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Side-Stepping Saints 



By 
GEORGE CLARKE PECK 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



^ A 



<K\ 



Copyright, 1918, by 
GEORGE CLARKE PECK 



MAR 25 1918 
©CU494224 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. When Earth Was Young— Noah 7 

II. The Trail-Blazer— Abraham 20 

III. In Smaller Type — Isaac 33 

IV. His Mother's Favorite — Jacob 46 

V. A Slavery That Freed— Joseph 59 

VI. The Mountain-Man— Moses 73 

VII. What Constitutes a Majority — Joshua. 86 

VIII. On Behalf of God— Samuel 99 

IX. After God's Own Heart— David 113 

X. Fulfilling a Father's Dream — Solomon. 127 

XI. Down by the Brook— Elijah 141 

XII. The Understudy— Elisha 155 

XIII. The Preferred Man— Daniel 168 

XIV. Running Away From God — Jonah. ... 181 
XV. Where the Tides Meet— John Baptist. 195 

XVI. Changing His Trade— Matthew 208 

XVII. Accepting the Challenge — Nathanael . . 222 

[XVIII. The Man of Fire and Frost— Peter. ... 236 

XIX. The Hiding of Self— Andrew 249 

XX. The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved— John 262 

XXI. A Night Visitor— Nicodemus 275 

XXII. When the Heavens Opened— Stephen. 289 

XXIII. On the Damascus Road— Paul 303 

XXIV. The Plea for Certainty— Thomas 316 



I 

WHEN EARTH WAS YOUNG— NOAH 

Some years ago there came under my eye 
an article entitled "The Real Abraham Lin- 
coln." I cannot recall any part of its contents, 
nor even that I read more than the title. No 
matter. All that interests me now is the 
implication that, after so many pages had been 
written about Lincoln, the real truth should 
have yet to be told. Why not say always 
remain untold? You cannot put into a por- 
trait or a book the whole man. Most of him, 
sometimes the best and most interesting part 
of him, fails to get into the book or the frame. 
And still more unfortunate is our usual prac- 
tice with celebrities. We hit upon some single 
trait or achievement, as if it expressed the 
entire man. 

Thus, for example, we fix in memory the 
great names of history. Leonidas, who, with 
a little band of Spartans, held back the tide of 
war; Cleopatra, the woman who stole the iron 
from Mark Anthony's soul; Luther defying 
a whole ecclesiastical establishment; Joan of 

7 



8 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Arc leading the armies of her beloved France; 
Cromwell setting his foot on the neck of a 
king; Lincoln freeing the slave — so we remem- 
ber them. I am not saying that we ought 
to forget any part of what we remember; all 
I am saying is that we do not remember enough. 
When Dewey came home from a victory, the 
results of which have embarrassed us ever 
since, we let our staid selves go, and gave him 
a sort of Roman triumph. People thronged 
the streets, and nudged one another excitedly, 
and said "There he goes — the man who sank 
the Spanish fleet." So he did; but what about 
the rest and residue of the man? 

Thus we glance through the pictorial section 
of paper or magazine. "0, yes, that is the man 
who stopped Von Kluck at the Marne. And 
that other is the winner of the national tennis 
championship. And yonder is the head of 
the Union that brought Congress to terms. 
And here is the most beautiful woman in New 
York or Seattle." Very correct, no doubt, 
and more or less useful. I am merely remind- 
ing you how partial and unsatisfactory such 
information is. Likely, a little further infor- 
mation would be far more interesting and 
helpful. 



NOAH 9 

Thus most people read the Bible — when they 
read it at all. Or, at least, thus they remember 
what was taught them in Sunday School, in 
childhood, or what has been heard in sermons 
since. Usually we practice a sort of "high- 
strikes" upon the Bible. We pick out this 
notable for one thing, and that one for some- 
thing else. Abraham; we know him; he gave 
his name to a people. Moses; surely; he 
led out a race of slaves. Daniel; why, certainly; 
he defied a heathen court, and passed what 
most of us would consider a bad night. Jere- 
miah, the weeper; Judas, the betrayer; Pilate, 
the hand-washer. So we have them all tagged 
and ticketed. And we miss so much. Our 
usual picture is like an artist's sketch — not 
filled in. Hardly that. It consists of two 
or three bold strokes, hit or miss. The great- 
est saint in the Bible needs to be studied on 
his bad days as well as his good ones. And 
most of the great sinners of the Bible deserve 
to be rescued from their reputations long 
enough to be looked at kindly, if not forgiv- 
ingly — as I tried to do in a previous volume. 

This time I want to bring you some of the 
flesh and blood saints of the Bible; with their 
flesh still covering their bones. Warm flesh 



\ 



10 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

— like yours and mine; tempted flesh; weak 
flesh, sometimes wanton. I want you to see 
how utterly human they were; how precarious 
their foothold on the heights; and how pain- 
fully they fought their way back to the path. 
I want you to learn again how small a big man 
may be; and how mean a good man can be- 
come — just as, elsewhere, I pointed out the 
redeeming qualities of the damned. Cain and 
Abel live on our street; and perhaps, if we 
knew a little more about Abel, we should be 
more tolerant toward Cain. 

But Noah; we are to study him just now. 
Obviously, he needs no introduction. We 
are reminded of him, often, when it rains hard. 
We speak his name, and describe a particular 
downpour as a "deluge." Even the children 
are acquainted with him, for what toy outfit 
is complete without its Noah's ark? But 
there the interest usually ends, for adults as 
well as children. What sort of man he was 
before his memorable experience, what he did 
with his life afterward, few could tell. As 
somebody says: "No other man has suffered 
from the Flood as Noah. It has drowned 
his reputation." That is, it has swept away 
most other human interest in him. Remem- 



NOAH 11 

ber that he was a man before the Flood — just 
as Grant was before he was called to lead an 
army; as you were before you made your pile, 
or broke your heart, or watched your baby die. 
And he was a man afterward, with an experience 
he would be glad to let us forget — just as Ben- 
edict Arnold would like us to drop the curtain 
over West Point; and Galileo over his cow- 
ardly retraction; as you would give worlds, 
if you had them, to expunge part of your 
record since your clock struck twelve. 

Noah the man — and, incidentally, the builder 
of an ark; so let us study him. And, first, un- 
der Peter's description, as a "preacher of right- 
eousness." Yes, a "preacher" — like all the 
rest of us. I do not know the text of any of 
his sermons. In fact, I do not suppose that 
he delivered any "sermon," so called. Yet he 
preached every day in the weeks of his long 
life. Preached while he was felling the trees 
for his strange craft. Preached as he laid the 
timbers. Preached as he marshaled the fellow- 
occupants of his house-boat. Preached all 
the time — just as all of us do, with or without 
intent. Who gave us long-frocked and white- 
tied men the right to narrow to ourselves the 
name "preacher"? Sometimes we are not 



12 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

even the most effective preachers. And some- 
times, again, we deliver our most forceful ser- 
mons away from the pulpit. Preachers? Why, 
I have been preached to by my dog, by my 
newspaper, by the silent stars. Everybody 
preaches, as long as he lives — and O, the ser- 
mons in the faces of the dead! They say that 
Herod never succeeded in banishing from his 
waking dreams the eyes in the gory head of 
John Baptist. Think of a sermon as long as 
that! 

Pardon; I do not mean to say that all 
preaching is preaching of righteousness— ex- 
cept by indirection. There are bad sermons as 
well as good sermons, out of pulpits as truly as 
in. And dry sermons too. You preached a 
dismally] dry [one when you went to your task 
with a whine, or when you made your contribu- 
tion with so wry a face. I heard a bad sermon, 
in an elevator, the other day, when a fellow- 
passenger took the beautiful name of my Lord 
in vain. And, for a moment, my blood ran 
cold. And I wanted to strike the blasphemer. 
And I am not sure but a solid blow across his 
unclean mouth would have proved a very good 
sermon. You were preaching a sermon while 
you were putting across that crooked deal 



NOAH 13 

down town; or repeating an unkind runior; 
or using your tongue as a whip. There's plenty 
of preaching, if all of it were useful preaching. 
But so many of our sermons contradict the 
rest of our preaching. 

But to be a preacher of righteousness — there 
is no other call like the call to be that: on 
street-corners, in shops, at home. Dr. Mathe- 
son, to whom I am indebted for so many 
illuminating glimpses into the Bible, says that 
Noah would be called to-day a "street-preach- 
er." Really, I do not know where Matheson 
found that in the narrative. I cannot discover 
any hint that Noah ever called anybody to 
repentance. He lived in an age so corrupt/^ 
that God was sorry he had put men here. Yet 
I do not discover that Noah said anything 
about righteousness. He simply went ahead 
with his clean life, and built the ark as rever- 
ently as you would build a sermon or a shrine. 

If I were asked to name the best preacher 
in any city, I am not sure that I should pick 
an ordained minister. I might; but my choice 
would be determined by other considerations 
than pulpit effectiveness. I should select the 
man — or the woman — with the cleanest life, 
the most cheery face toward his task, the sun- 






\ 



14 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

niest optimism, and the most sympathetic 
hand. Of necessity he would preach to a 
smaller audience than most clergymen do, 
but his sermons would take deeper root than 
most pulpit ministrations. What a sermon 
Florence Nightingale preached. What a preach- 
er was Alice Freeman Palmer among the stu- 
dents at Wellesley and her neighbors! — one 
of whom said that sight of her changed the day. 
I am not sure that that prince of American 
preachers, Phillips Brooks, ever delivered in 
Trinity Church so majestic and winsome a 
discourse as the wordless discourse of a presence 
which, they said, made Boston streets less 
gloomy. Which was the greatest sermon that 
Jesus ever delivered? The "Sermon on the 
Mount" or the sermon to Nicodemus? Neither. 
Both would be forgotten except for the sermon 
he preached with his life and his cross. To 
work without frowning and bear pain without 
whining; to meet evil with an aseptic soul, and 
to hold up the lamp before uncertain feet — 
that is preaching righteousness. Gauged thus, 
how much of a preacher are you? 

But Noah. Perhaps it is merely repetition 
of what I have been saying: Noah was the first 
good man to be interested in saving anybody 



NOAH 15 

else. Abel was a good man. The Record 
hints nothing against him. So far as we know 
he gave up his soul as clean as he first received it. 
But I do not find any intimation that he both- 
ered to take anybody else to heaven with him. 
And Enoch; the man who walked with God 
clear past the shadow into the glory of perfect 
day. Not a fleck or a stain ! Perhaps that was 
sermon enough! But Enoch went alone. I 
am not aware that he ever asked for company. 
Noah was different. His huge ark was an 
inclusive affair. He might have escaped on a 
far less expensive scale. But he built the ark 
big — big enough for the world to see. If his 
neighbors had heeded his sermon, there need 
have been no flood. He was the first good man 
with a passion for helping others. 

Have you ever stopped to consider how selfish 
a good man may be with his goodness? Some- 
times I think that the most covertly pernicious 
selfishness on earth is the selfishness of a cor- 
rect life. I mean the selfishness of a clean 
life whose concern ends at its own door. Most 
of us are prompt enough to hate the ordinary 
forms of selfishness — even while we practice 
them. I have never outgrown my disaffection 
for two playmates with greedy hands that 



16 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

grabbed all the cookies in sight and carried off 
all our common toys. In one of my parishes 
we had a rather handsome chap nicknamed 
"Stingy Charlie." They said he earned the 
sobriquet years before by his unwillingness to 
spend a penny upon anybody else. And it was 
a tradition of the neighborhood that the girls 
used to drag him past drug stores, for the sheer 
delight of watching his sufferings at mention 
of ice cream soda. And when I had occasion 
to ask for contributions to missions I found 
that his purse had learned no new ways. You 
cannot really like such folks — or selfishness in 
any of its ordinary forms. Selfishness with 
talent, selfishness with happiness, selfishness 
in love — we instinctively reprobate them all. 
But selfishness in the matter of getting to 
heaven — we still wink at that. Indeed, some 
people act as if it were a sort of special grace. 

Thank God for Noah: the good man, who, 
whatever his faults, early or late, felt a respon- 
sibility for his neighbors, and for the future of 
the world. Of course salvation is a personal 
affair. You cannot improve folks wholesale. 
As Rutherford phrased it, "The soul of all 
improvement is the improvement of the soul." 
And that improvement, like charity, begins at 



NOAH 17 

home — with one's self. Much of the world's 
good advice is given by the wrong people. Dr. 
Buckley says that the greatest lecture he ever 
heard on "Success" was delivered by a man 
who had failed in everything else he tried to 
do. No use trying to reform the other man 
until you have reformed yourself. Test the 
medicine before you recommend it. Give the 
seeds of a good life a chance in your own acres. 

And then? Then have an eager concern as 
to what grows in your neighbor's garden. Cain's 
question was an insult to God. I am my 
brother's keeper. Not to pry into his affairs, 
not to badger him, not to sting him with offen- 
sive superiority, but to help him on his way to 
the City of Light. I am my brother's keeper. 
Toward that conviction the world has been 
moving fast the past few years. In that con- 
viction we have taken some huge strides — in 
industry, in civics, in sanitation. Why are 
we so slow in the highest business of all? So 
selfish, still in goodness? Cain or Christ? 

But Noah: I should be glad to speak of 
his industry; of the patience of his waiting; 
of his discovery of the rainbow, and a dozen 
other significant things in his life story. He 
made all but a clean record — and then — then 



18 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

he slipped, and you see him drunk, disgrace- 
fully drunk, in his tent. I might pause to 
write a homily on the greatest single curse the 
world has ever known. Newspapers all over 
the land are shouting the advantages of de- 
feating prohibition. But they are not men- 
tioning the advantage of continuing to make 
drunkards, and of paying for city improve- 
ments out of the wreckage. We have got a 
chance to hit hard, and, as Roosevelt says, 
when you hit at all, it is a crime to hit soft. 

But Noah teaches a bigger lesson still. 
There are various kinds of drunkenness. Notice 
that it was after the stress of Flood-days was 
past, and the building of the ark had become 
a memory, and life waxed pleasant, Noah 
made his great misstep. With the subsidence 
of the waters outside, the heroic tide ebbed in 
Noah's soul. He began to enjoy himself, as 
you would say. He retired from business and 
bought a farm. Or, in the language of the 
Record, he "began to be an husbandman, and 
he planted a vineyard." 

Somewhere I have read an essay on "The 

^ Perils of Middle Age" — when ardor cools, 

and ambitions grow more mercenary, and the 

soul loves an armchair. God help you, friend, 



NOAH 19 

when you reach the stage at which you feel 
entitled to sit pat and look out for yourself. 
But the warning applies to everybody. I 
shall not worry about you while life is earnest; 
while you are building your ark, or while the 
flood is raging around. It is in your quiet, 
unheroic days that I need to be anxious. Then 
comes the real deluge — the inward flood — 
drunkenness with ease, with comfort, with 
idleness, with luxury. When Noah forgot 
his duty to the other man he forgot himself. 
You cannot live to yourself; the moment 
you begin, you begin to lose yourself. 

I lift the curtain again to show you Noah 
going on — three hundred and fifty years more, 
if we may take the record literally. But 
the number of years does not count so large. 
He evidently learned his lesson. One suf- 
ficed. 



II 

THE TRAIL-BLAZER— ABRAHAM 

Abraham the pioneer — I find myself half 
sorry that I picked him for a chapter. We 
know so much about him. I mean that so 
little is left to the imagination. 'Tis the unex- 
plored that is frequently most interesting. 
Here, for me as a boy, lay part of the charm 
of the gloomy old attic in grandfather's house. 
I never was quite sure what I might find. Old 
pictures, old clocks, old trinkets — what ro- 
mances I could build upon them, unembarrassed 
by dry-as-dust facts! An attic, with all its 
contents ticketed and classified, would have 
been quite as uninteresting as the multipli- 
cation table. 

Have you seen the huge prehistoric animals 

in museums — dinosaur, icthyosaurus, and the 

rest — all reconstructed by archaeologists, with 

a big bone or two as a hint? Nobody knows 

just how the creatures looked. Nobody ever 

will. But it must be a sort of rare sport 

for the scientists to imagine their appearance, 

and then to work out the fancy in plaster or 

20 



ABRAHAM 21 

pulp. What is a historical novel, so called? 
Why, it is a story woven into the warp of a 
few facts. You spoil the story if you keep 
stopping every few minutes to ask whether 
this or that really happened. Never mind 
whether it did or not. Such things do happen. 
And the novelist simply lets his imagination 
play upon a handful of bare facts until they 
swell and sprout and bloom into a story. Oth- 
erwise he might as well be a historian, and 
done with it. 

So with folks — like Abraham or Paul: John 
Smith or Mary Jones. I do not need to know 
everything there is to be known about them. 
Not even when I appropriate one of them as 
personal friend. Better leave some corners 
unlighted, some chapters unwritten, some 
things to dream about. Only the besottedly 
scientific mind insists upon digging all the data 
out of the soul of a man. And he ends in dis- 
appointment. A thoroughly explored soul is 
like a flower after you have done botanizing it: 
the wonder and the bloom are gone. 

So, I repeat, I am half sorry I selected Abra- 
ham for our subject. I am sure I could write 
a better story about him if neither you nor I 
knew so many things about him. Where he 



22. SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

came from, the company he had, precisely 
what he said and did on various occasions — 
all this may be important for his biographer. 
But I am not his biographer: I am romancing 
about him. Hence I need freedom to tell his 
story in my own way. I want to imagine 
some things about him; to dream a few dreams 
in his name; to see him as he was before the 
first chronicler met him. 

First, then, I want to ask why he left Chaldea 
to play pioneer. We usually assume — that is, 
in case we take the trouble to weigh the matter 
— that he set out to seek his fortune, like the 
gold-hunters in '49, or the first settlers in 
Oklahoma. Of course he might have done that, 
and without inviting criticism. He might 
have been tired of the dull streets of Ur, unsat- 
isfied with the interest rates there, and a bit 
disgusted with the ways of some of his neigh- 
bors. Men have turned emigrant for just 
such reasons, and left no red eyes behind. 
But I do not think the explanation fits the 
case. The city he left behind was a good deal 
bigger town than any he was likely to see- He 
was leaving a certainty for an uncertainty 
when he crossed the frontier into an unfa- 
miliar land. And I, personally, believe 



ABRAHAM 23 

that he carried a heartache instead of a harp 
of joy. 

But what else could he do? God had stirred 
him up, and a Finger that Abraham dared not 
disobey seemed pointing on and out. Have 
you watched a mother bird teaching her brood 
to fly? And did it ever occur to you that the 
fledglings were probably quite willing to stay 
in the nest, and be warm, and be fed without 
effort of their own? They do not know any- 
thing about flying — the sweep of it, the free- 
dom, the thrill. Nor will they learn until they 
have been thrust out. Maybe I am wrong 
about the birds, but I am not mistaken about 
folks. Most of us love the nest — of tradition, 
of security, of repose. Above most other 
visitations we hate to be disturbed. I have 
known men who would not listen to a hard- 
luck story if they could help it, lest their 
sympathies be kindled uncomfortably. And 
women who declined to look certain evils in 
the face, for fear God would lay upon them 
a disquieting commission. I wonder if this 
is not one explanation of their apathy, on the 
part of a multitude of church people, toward 
the Prohibition campaign? They do not want 
to be wrought up. They do not mean to lose 



24 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

any meals or sleep or peace or money as the 
result of getting aroused. Stand-patters are 
we — most of us — in politics, and religion and 
in the very face of God. And God has to use 
the sharp goad of pain, or the cold sting of 
disappointment, or the scalding tears of grief, 
to set us awake. 

As a matter of curiosity, I should like to 
know just what roused Abraham. Of course 
you have here the exact words of divine ad- 
dress. But you do not believe that God framed 
his command in Hebrew, and talked it into 
the ear of the patriarch, as a trainman calls 
out the names of the stations. God talks as 
plainly to-day as he ever talked — which is by 
no means plainly enough for some people. 
He speaks in the soul, not to the ear. He uses 
all sorts of moods and starts and wearinesses 
— nay, bitternesses and disgusts. And the 
words we have recorded in the Bible are sim- 
ply human approximations to — shall I say, 
human translations of? — the things God was 
saying to the soul. I wish I knew just what 
ministry God used to rouse Abraham. 

A great unrest, perhaps. God uses that 
often to get his children awake. Did you ever 
watch a flock of migratory birds just before 



ABRAHAM 25 

their migration? A strange restlessness had 
fallen upon them. And the young birds that 
had never seen the land of their destination 
were as uneasy as the rest. Such a fluttering 
and a calling; such a pluming of wings and 
such strange, far-away eyes. In his own 
wonderful way God was calling them. And 
so He calls folks — by a great unrest. Days 
are in which we seem to lose taste for the 
ordinary food of life, and its toys look mean, 
and its wages absurd. You have had such 
days. Did it occur to you that God was thus 
stirring you to a higher vocation than the eat- 
ing of meals and the earning of dollars? Said 
the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, just before his 
death, "I cannot bear to leave the world 
with so much sin and misery in it." Beauti- 
ful lament! But it was the sin and misery of 
the world which woke his big heart, years before. 
Sometimes God calls by a crushing disap- 
pointment. They say that back of the aus- 
tere vows of the sisterhoods of the Roman 
Catholic Church there is, in most cases, some 
racking disappointment — a broken heart per- 
haps. I can well believe it. Normal women, 
gifted women, beautiful women, as some of 
them are, do not naturally choose such a life 



26 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

of lowly ministry. Naturally, they would have 
chosen just what our mothers chose: home 
and love and children. Disappointment broke 
the old ties and drove them out. And the 
sweetness of many of their faces and the gen- 
tleness of their voices were wrung out of personal 
agony. 

And, then, sometimes God calls by illness. 
More than once have I heard said, concerning 
a selfish, ingrowing life, that a severe illness 
might prove the divinest blessing. "Do you 
know where I would go if I could get out of 
here?" moaned the broken Heine; "I would 
go straight to the church of my father." Heine 
the scoffer, Heine the cynic, Heine the cor- 
rupt, driven out by the lash of great suffering, 
would go straight to the church he had scorned. 
So God often makes use of raging fevers and 
deadly pestilence to unsettle us in the seats of 
ignoble ease. And so, sometimes by the sting 
of a wretched miscalculation, sometimes by 
the consequences of a blighting sin, sometimes 
by the urge of a deep love, God stirs us. In 
Abraham's case, I cannot name the agent. 
All I know is that, one day, God succeeded in 
thrusting Abraham across the frontier, and 
that Abraham went. 



ABRAHAM 27 

But when he went he did not even know the 
destination. Have you noticed that? His bio- 
grapher does not mention it. But a man, 
writing centuries later, does. He seizes upon 
it as upon the most significant fact in the 
migration: Abraham "went out, not knowing 
whither he went." To know where you are 
going and yet keep on going, to see the distant 
scene and yet set your face toward it, as flint, 
is very beautiful. John Huss did that when, 
in full view of the results to himself, he refused 
to recant. Major Kiernan did it when he 
dug spurs into his horse and charged into the 
woods saying, "General, it is the same as 
saying 'You must be killed' but, General, I 
will do it." One of our bishops showed that 
rare spirit when, though he knew that the 
man in the front seat had a loaded revolver 
ready to discharge at him, he went on calmly 
with the session of the Conference. 

But there is a finer spirit still. It is the 
spirit of the pioneer who knowing not where 
the road may lead, or what it may cost, holds 
his way without faltering. There is a familiar 
cynicism which runs like this: 

"I don't know where I'm going, 
But I'm on my way." 



28 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

You have probably quoted it, or heard it 
quoted, in derision, scores of times. Exactly. 
But has it occurred to you that many of the 
holiest pilgrimages of earth must be made 
in that spirit? Often the real "pilgrim of the 
Infinite" hasn't the faintest conception where 
he is going to arrive, but still he keeps going. 
So, in those verses which Billy Sunday quotes 
with such dramatic effect, Columbus cries 
to his captain, in spite of mutiny, and threat- 
ening sea, and no land in sight: "Sail on, 
and on, and on." So the Pilgrims voyaged 
to these then unwelcoming shores. They were 
not coming to Baltimore, or New York, or 
even to Boston. Simply they had been driven 
from home by the lash of religious intolerance. 
They had to go. And they went out, not 
knowing whither they went, except that they 
followed the index finger of God. So, more 
than once, during the past two years, our 
President has had to lead on, uncertain of the 
event. Mistakes? Of course. But I am 
thinking just now of the loneliness and incer- 
titude of the path. 

And so we must make many of our most 
worthy journeys. Some days we cannot see the 
distant scene, for mists of tears, or turns of 



ABRAHAM 29 

the road. If we wait for road-maps or geog- 
raphy, we shall miss the Land of Promise, 
altogether. We must go on, driven out by 
God, driven onward by God, and only sure: 

"He knows the way He takes 
And I may walk with Him." 

But another thing about Abraham. He 
was a builder of altars. You can trace his path 
by the altars he reared. At Bethel and at 
Mamre in particular, he left memorials of 
God. Great joy, great sorrow, great per- 
plexity suggested the need of an altar. He 
marked his conquests by consecrations. No 
soil too foreign to hold its altar. Whether 
the inhabitants cheered or jeered, he built 
his altar. Can you think of anything else 
our business streets need more keenly than 
they need altars to God? The chief trouble 
with business is that so much of it is done 
behind God's back, so to speak. That is, he 
does not enter into the calculation. As one 
man said to me: "Scruples be hanged. I'm 
down here to make money." He could not say 
that sort of thing in sight of an altar. He 
could not build an altar to that kind of suc- 
cess. What use of the church uptown unless it 
inspires us to rear altars downtown? 



30 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

And altars uptown, too. Altars in homes, 
in friendship, in pleasure. Real marriage altars 
would clear the docket in the divorce courts. 
In the near future I am to perform a wedding 
ceremony for a girl whom I have known from 
her babyhood. I can scarcely realize that 
she has come to the door beyond which lies 
the heaven or hell of life for her. And, inev- 
itably, I am thinking ahead: further than 
she is thinking. I have heard much about 
the furnishing of the new home, but no words 
about an altar; much about a trousseau, but 
nothing about an altar. And yet I know that 
an altar in that new home is more important 
than rare woods, or fine silver, or costly gar- 
ments. Missing the altar — what? If we ce- 
mented our friendships beside an altar, there 
would be few violations of trust. If there 
were an altar on the golf-links, I do not believe 
there would be much Sunday golf. Altars, 
altars, altars! Dispense with anything else 
before you try to get on without altars. God 
must have the first place in life; or — pardon 
me — he will not have any. Cut out anything 
and everything else rather than omit your 
prayers and your homage to God. 

But I notice another significant thing about 



ABRAHAM 31 

this ancient pioneer. It is not in the bio- 
graphical sketch. But James, reading that 
sketch, smiled and said, "Abraham, . . . the 
friend of God." Who shall suggest a choicer 
compliment? I have heard one man referred 
to as a friend of the President; and another 
as a friend of Rockefeller, and still another as 
a friend of John Burroughs. And naturally 
I felt a secret twinge of jealousy. Perhaps 
I was half inclined to doff my hat to the friend 
of the other. But to be a friend of God, and 
to have God honor the appellation — have you 
conceived the dignity of that? I have been 
re-reading Abraham's record in the light of 
his name. And I think he deserved it. Of 
course he made mistakes, and some grievous 
ones. I find it hard to forgive him his denial 
of Sarah and his treatment of Hagar. But 
Abraham was not the last man to be made a 
coward by women. Some men are more afraid 
of their wives than they are of the police. 
That is to say, they take more chances with 
the police. But most of the time Abraham 
deserved his name, "friend of God." See him 
when a king tried to bribe him. No, you 
cannot bribe a friend of God. See him when 
quarrel threatened between him and his broth- 



32 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

er-in-law. No; it takes two to make a quar- 
rel; and when one of the parties is a friend of 
God, there will be no quarrel. See him plead 
for a condemned city, that God will spare it. 
The friend of God will always take the part of 
the condemned. See him on Moriah, ready 
to give up his own son — as so many fathers 
and mothers have given up their boys to the 
trenches. The friend of God balks at no test 
of friendship. Friend of God: friend of God 
— O, to be worthy of such description ! 



m 

IN SMALLER TYPE— ISAAC 

If I were God, I should have made all oak- 
leaves alike, and all elm-leaves, and all maples. 
That would seem the normal way. But, evi- 
dently, it is not God's way; for knowing ones 
affirm that no two leaves in a forest of oaks or 
maples are copies, each of the other. If I 
were God, I certainly should have fashioned 
all human feet the same size and shape. Think 
of the convenience to shoemakers and the econ- 
omy to us. Whereas, not even the pair of feet 
on which you walk to business are exact mates. 
If I were God, I should have created souls as 
similar as Waltham watches, concerning which 
they say that the parts are interchangeable. 
What a vast deal of confusion and misjudg- 
ment, of heart-burning and bitterness would 
be saved if souls were alike. Yet God con- 
tinues to build us so individual and diverse 
that sometimes we cannot recognize ourselves 
as children of the same Father. 

Whatever else God loves, he evidently loves 

33 



34 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

variety — most of all in his children. And I, 
for one, am trying to learn to accept his way. 
Once I thought I knew how to classify people — 
sheep and goats, good and bad, false and true. 
I do not try any more. For I have found that 
each man constitutes a class of his own. And 
for me to judge one man by another ends in 
unfairness to him and discomfort to me. God 
loves variety. See it in the Bible: Cain and 
Abel, Esau and Jacob, Peter and Andrew. 
Not even brothers alike — I wonder if that is 
why Cain killed Abel; and Esau would have 
enjoyed seeing Jacob drawn and quartered: 
and Peter must have wished he had the re- 
making of Andrew. 

But I emphasize this point merely to prepare 
you for a startling study in contrasting men. In 
the previous chapter we pondered Abraham; 
now Isaac is our man. Father and son! We 
have an old saying that passes for solemn 
truth: "Like father, like son." And some- 
times it is true. At least it is true often enough 
to make every father careful of the way he 
walks — not only after his son is born but all 
the years before. "Like father, like son." I 
have seen some beautiful as well as some fear- 
ful illustrations of the truth. But there are, 



ISAAC 35 

evidently, other elements to be taken into 
account — mother and grandfather and grand- 
mother, and their parents, and so on back for 
a hundred generations — to the jungle, perhaps. 
Yes, and home influence, and school, and play- 
mates, and the chance infections of good and 
evil. Who shall dare to name all the factors 
which, under God, enter into the making of 
a man? But here is the result: sometimes 
you must say, in joy or in shame, "Like father, 
unlike son." 

So with Isaac: you would never pick him for 
the son of his father. Judging by the Record, 
you would not think that a drop of Abraham's 
blood ran in Isaac's veins. And the worst 
feature of the contrast is that it shows so 
plainly to the disadvantage of the son. A step 
down, and a big one! I remember painfully 
the jolt I got crossing a street. It was night, 
and dark, and I was thinking of other matters. 
At any rate, I assumed that the distance from 
the curb to the street was the usual one. So, 
mechanically, I stepped off — and spent the 
next few minutes examining my sore anatomy, 
gathering up my personal effects, and dusting 
my clothes. Not altogether dissimilar, I think, 
is our mood when we come from Abraham 



36 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

down to Isaac. Abraham was a pioneer, 
Isaac a stay-at-home. Abraham opened up 
a new land; Isaac dug a few wells — and old 
ones at that. Abraham wrote his name big in 
history; Isaac wrote his name so small that, 
but for his famous father, you might have 
missed the signature altogether. At first sight, 
'tis a rather painful study in contrasts. 

Perhaps we need to look again. For, I am 
not at all sure that the contrast need be em- 
barrassing — even to Isaac himself. Nothing 
is, ordinarily, more profitless than a discussion 
of greatness — whether among poems or virtues 
or people. Tennyson's "Maud" covers more 
paper than his "Crossing the Bar," but the 
latter has sung its way into millions of weary 
hearts. Courage is doubtless a more outstand- 
ing virtue than chastity or gentleness, but who 
shall say it means more to the kingdom of 
heaven? Billy Sunday preaches to larger au- 
diences than Phillips Brooks ever saw. Does 
that uncrown Phillips Brooks? Suppose we 
leave all such arbitraments to high school 
debating societies, while we rest with God the 
question of greatness; and, more especially, 
as believing that the place in which God puts 
a man is a great place to show what sort of man 



ISAAC 37 

he is. Paul imagines a very interesting dis- 
cussion among the various members of the 
body, as to the relative dignity of each. And 
I have heard just such discussions outside the 
Bible: one man telling another how much 
better he could get on without feet than with- 
out hands, or how much more comfortably one 
could spare his hearing than his sight. Maybe 
that is why the mole lost his eyes and the 
rabbit his tail. Meantime God is kind enough 
to endow us with the despised as well as the 
exalted members. Evidently his scale of values 
is different from ours. We measure men in 
inches, and tell which is tallest; or on the 
scales, and say which is heaviest; or in the 
public eye, and name the most useful; or in 
terms of the heart, and confess which one we 
love best. I wonder if God has still other 
tables for measuring and appraising men. 
Jesus said once, "Many that are first shall be 
last; and the last shall be first." 

Abraham or Isaac? — I am glad that I do not 
need to choose between them. In the same 
famous gallery hang Millet's "Sowers" and a 
brilliant battle picture, the name of the painter 
of which I have forgotten. I suppose the boys 
would like the battle scene better; and maybe 



38 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the girls would also. You can fairly smell 
the smoke of the guns, and hear the challenging 
cry of the commander. And you can see the 
blood. 'Tis a canvas of triumph — and defeat. 
For, be it remembered, on fields of that sort, 
one side must always lose in order that the 
other may win. But in the quiet harvest 
fields which Millet figures the case is different. 
And is the tilling of soil, and the planting 
of furrows, and the patient gathering of har- 
vest less important to the world than the win- 
ning of battles? Abraham was a fighter; Isaac 
was a farmer. And while I would filch no part 
of Abraham's fame, for the enrichment of his 
quiet son's reputation, it will be well to write 
Isaac's name large. 

God knows I honored my father. He was 
big and fearless, a natural leader of men. He 
used to fill my eyes and heart. But imagine 
taking the crown from my mother in order to 
magnify his name. Imagine a boy admitting 
that his father is greater than his mother; 
greater than the woman who gave him her 
own life, and held him against the heart of her, 
and taught him his prayers, and sang him to 
sleep. O, women, let nobody tell you that 
earth holds higher honor than motherhood! 



ISAAC 39 

If your crown is less pretentious than the crown 
your husband wears — or your brother's, or 
your congressman's, remember that it may be 
set with finer gems. Size proves nothing, 
nor does noise, nor vehemence. Soul counts, 
and that alone. 

And in such terms I am thinking of Isaac. 
Matheson says that Isaac illustrates the femi- 
nine element of human nature. Not the effem- 
inate, but the feminine, which is never absent 
from the souls of the greatest men. 'Twas the 
feminine in Lincoln that made him so tender; 
and in Whittier, and Charles Lamb, and John 
the Beloved, and Jesus. Preeminently Jesus. 
He is the personification of the gentleness of 
woman blended with the rugged strength of 
man. Man at his best is not all male. God 
pity him — and, children, keep away from him 
— unless he has borrowed from the mother 
who bore him and the good women who have 
loved him, fibers of pity, impulses of gentle- 
ness, qualities of self-repression. 

Yes, for some qualities I rank Isaac above 
his robust father. Quietness is not weakness; 
it may be index of the most perfect strength. 
Science distinguishes between two kinds of 
power* — static and dynamic. Your rushing 



40 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

torrent is an example of dynamic power; your 
quiet lake in the hills is example of the other. 
But the quiet lake will run more cars and light 
more streets than the raging torrent will. 
Whence the power men have stolen from 
Niagara, to turn wheels and illuminate homes 
in Buffalo? Not from the Falls, with their 
rush and fury and foam, but from the com- 
paratively quiet river above the Falls. So, as 
between men. Our tests are still crude. We 
incline to measure power by noise. And I 
can stand a reasonable amount of bluster and 
brash in a stirring man. I can even smile at 
his strut, so long as he really is marching behind 
our King. But I need to remember, and you 
probably do also, that the strut does not make 
the soldier; nor noise argue strength. You 
cannot gauge the power of an automobile by 
its exhaust; nor a man. Much of the world's 
most enduring work has been done by men who 
were as silent as frost or sunlight, as life or love. 
Isaac was one of your quiet sort. But you 
could not write history and omit him. 

Shall I name three of his powers? Take his 
loyalty. Loyalty is one of the quiet virtues, 
but life grows squalid and contemptible in 
absence of it. I would rather have loyalty 



ISAAC 41 

from my child than all the presents he could 
bestow; and from my friend ahead of all the 
hospitality he can offer or the compliments he 
can pay. Just plain loyalty — that quiet, un- 
advertised gift of another soul to mine. Noth- 
ing can succeed against the back-water of 
disloyalty. One day there drove up to Napo- 
leon an orderly, a mere lad, bearing dispatches. 
He had ridden hard; he was white; he was 
wounded. And with the safe delivery of his 
packet the boy slipped from the saddle to the 
ground — dead. He did not even live to hear 
the beautiful word spoken over him by his 
commander: "Gentlemen," said Napoleon, 
with a strange, dry voice, "that was loyalty." 
Why, you can win any sort of campaign in that 
spirit. 

Isaac wore the white flower of loyalty with 
a certain audacity. He was loyal all the time. 
The word is written over his life, up and down, 
across and back. Loyal to his father when 
loyalty seemed like to cost him his life, for there 
is no hint that even in that tense moment on 
Mount Moriah, when Isaac's life was at stake, 
Isaac protested. Loyal to his beautiful Re- 
bekah, so passionately loyal — save for one 
cowardly denial — that the idyll of their love 



42 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

is immortalized in modern wedding rituals. 
Loyal to his word, even when it had been 
wrung from him by the crafty Jacob in 
the matter of a special blessing. Loyal to 
God, when God blocked the way to Egypt. 
"Look about you," reads the inscription over 
the ashes of Sir Christopher Wren, in Saint 
Paul's, London; "Look about you, and behold 
his monument." The Cathedral itself is his 
memorial. His name is written all over it; 
cut into the stone, and traced in its windows, 
and whispered from the pipes of its organ. So 
Isaac has left his name graven indelibly on a 
certain home in Gerar. And the first word 
in that name is loyalty. 

But the second part of Isaac's name is not 
hard to read, though it was costly to write — 
unselfishness. Sometimes it appears as mod- 
esty, sometimes as generosity, sometimes as 
utter self-surrender. But the essence is the 
same — unselfishness. And unselfishness is an- 
other quiet virtue. The moment you hoist 
a flag over it you spoil it. Remember how 
Jesus phrased it: "When thou doest thine 
alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as 
the hypocrites do, . . . that they may have 
glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have 



ISAAC 43 

their reward." When my friend does me a 
favor I do not want him to assure me what a 
sacrifice he is making. Else, I prefer him to 
distribute his favors elsewhere. Unselfishness 
"will out," more surely than murder will. 
Then let me find out, some day, how great 
a thing my friend has done without announce- 
ment, and I shall build several tiers higher the 
monument of my appreciation. Mothers, do 
not often tell your children how rich part of 
your life you have given them. Christians, 
do not be always spreading before your Lord 
the record of your denials. Leave somewhat 
to leak out. Let your unselfishness be un- 
selfish. If the widow who cast her entire 
fortune into the treasury had paused midway 
in the act, to advertise her sacrifice, Jesus would 
have permitted her to build her own monu- 
ment. 

Isaac, the unselfish. Sound him anywhere, 
and you evoke that note. When his herdsmen 
got into trouble with a neighbor's employees, 
he quietly declined to fight, and moved on. 
Over the wells he re-dug, he spoke his father's 
name, calling their "names after the names 
by which his father had called them." And 
when his dearest wish for his favorite son was 



44 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

frustrated he kept his soul sweet before God 
and his household — unselfish to the last. 

And one thing more: Isaac was industrious 
with a redemptive industry. You never could 
defeat him, because he always began again 
the next morning. When the Philistines filled 
up the old wells he patiently re-dug them; and 
when they disputed his possession he quietly 
moved on and dug yet another. No strife, 
no time for calling of hard names, and no cry- 
ing over defeat. Like a man he began all over 
again with a smile and a cheer. When William 
Carey was a boy he fell out of a tree and broke his 
leg. And the first thing he did upon recovery 
was to go out and climb that same tree again. 
Foolish perhaps, but 'twas that same spirit, 
grown ripe and sweet, made him the heroic 
missionary he became. Audubon was almost 
crushed by the loss of his drawings, but he 
shouldered his gun and started for the forest, 
and won a finer result than the first. Can 
you do that? Then the world will never 
withhold from you her richest rewards. Much 
of the choicest work is work done over, with 
the patience and cheerfulness of God. Say 
you failed as a merchant; so did Grant. Say 
you failed as a teacher; so did Herschel. Say 



ISAAC 45 

you failed as a Christian; so did Peter. But 
these men dug new wells. Why not we? So 
we leave Isaac — the man of loyalty, the man 
of unselfishness, the man of industry — thank- 
ing God for him and for his lesson. 



IV 
HIS MOTHER'S FAVORITE— JACOB 

According to tradition, Henry VIII selected 
his fourth wife from a portrait. It was the 
portrait of a very beautiful woman. And 
Henry, being matrimonially free for the nonce, 
and always susceptible, decided that the origi- 
inal of the portrait was a suitable woman to 
share his throne. So Anne of Cleaves came 
to England. But, unfortunately, she was un- 
able to live up to her portrait. She was 
marked from smallpox. And, of course, you 
could hardly expect the artist to paint the 
blemishes. And, on the other hand, you could 
hardly expect Henry to enjoy the discrepancy. 
So Anne went home, and Henry looked further 
for a mate — all because a particular person 
could not live up to the reputation for beauty 
with which an idealizing brush had credited 
her. 

I am reminded of the incident by another 
portrait I have just been studying — a pen por- 
trait of Jacob. If I had never seen Jacob on 

46 



JACOB 47 

the pages of the Bible, I should pick him for a 
beautiful soul — judging from this recent por- 
trait. Everything that we could wish left out 
is suppressed or explained. But, alas! the 
"retouching" is overdone, as artists say. So 
much overdone that I think Jacob himself 
would decline to try to live up to such repu- 
tation. Indeed, I do not believe he would re- 
cognize himself in this modern portrait. Let 
me show him to you as he was: sly, timid, 
grasping, deceitful, yet with the making of a 
man of heroic stature. From the last chapter 
of his biography there looks out a face of sin- 
gular benignity and radiant peace. 'Tis the 
face of a saint. But the features — save for 
the softening of years and pain — are the 
features of the man we disliked at his begin- 
ning. God did a great piece of work on Jacob. 
He did more than idealize a man: he remade 
him. I want you to study the process. 

And the first thing I want you to notice is 
Jacob's unfortunate start. I say, "unfor- 
tunate," but who knows whether a silver spoon 
in the mouth, or a wooden one, is better for 
a boy to be born with? There are so many 
handicaps besides poverty and ignorance and 
pain: handicaps of wealth, of famous lineage, 



48 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

of popular expectation. Sometimes I think 
that more boys have sailed upon the rocks, 
under a brilliant sky, and with favorable winds, 
than have been driven upon the rocks in the 
dark and by storm. Who but God knows what 
is the best sort of start for a boy or girl? Abra- 
ham Lincoln was born in a cabin; George 
Washington saw the light of day in a home of 
affluence. Could you reverse the conditions 
and have the same beautiful results? Mary 
Lyon came out of obscurity to bless the world; 
Helen Gould bore a famous if not an honored 
name. Charles Darwin inherited a frail con- 
stitution, and had to fight all his days for 
strength to do his great work; Sir Alfred Wal- 
lace was a giant in constitution and endurance. 
Who but God shall name the real equipment 
for a child? 

But, say that Jacob was disadvantaged at 
the beginning. At least he was inferior by 
birth. He came into the world later than his 
brawny, magnetic brother. Esau would have 
filled the arms and heart of his mother — as, 
later, he filled the eye of his doting father. I 
have sometimes thought that the special ten- 
derness which his mother showed for Jacob was 
a sort of protest, on her part, against the 



JACOB 49 

obvious advantage of his brother. How like 
a woman— to take the part of the slighted and 
hurt! How like a mother — to fly to the rescue 
of a crippled or unlikely child! And, then, the 
name they gave him was reminder of his infer- 
iority. Jacob, the "Supplanter"! Every time 
he heard it he was reminded of his position. 
His mother said that when he came into the 
world his tiny fist was upon the heel of his older 
brother. Always the sense of being over- 
shadowed by Esau. If there were exploits to 
recount, they were Esau's. If there were 
hunting trophies to show, they were Esau's. 
Always Esau — and Jacob the "Supplanter"! 
Can you not imagine how the smart of it got 
into Jacob's soul? I have sat in the audience, 
at graduation, when the prizes were being 
distributed. Prizes for muscle, prizes for elo- 
cution, prizes for scholarship. And with each 
fresh award, there went up a generous salvo 
of applause from the rank and file. God bless 
the unrecognized for their ability to cheer! 
But was there no soreness at the heart? To 
see another carry off the prize I might have won is 
hard enough. But to see another carry off 
the prize I never could have won is bitterness of 
an exquisitely stinging sort. And it is this sort 



50 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

of bitterness which many a brother carries 
around in his heart, day after day. Talk 
about equality of opportunity as between eagles 
and ordinary poultry, or between greyhounds 
and moles! Said Stevenson once, "I haven't 
had a fair chance." And he smiled in his brave, 
contagious way. But when some of us say it 
we cannot even pretend to smile — the whole 
arrangement looks so unfair. 

So Jacob smarted, and brooded, and bided his 
time. Can you wonder that when the occasion 
offered he struck back? Shall we ever wonder 
at the hurt and disqualified when they strike 
back? But for the grace of God that is the 
thing to do. When they laughed him down 
in Parliament, Disraeli closed his speech with 
this fiery challenge, "The time will come 
when you will hear me." And hear him they 
did. Five years before her brilliant victory 
over Russia, Japan went back to her island, 
humiliated, outraged, defiant. She knew she 
had not had a square deal. And while her 
wrath smoldered, she planned, and prepared, 
and drilled armies. Then she struck back, and 
the world wondered. 

But we are thinking of Jacob. His hour 
came strangely over a brew of lentils. Tired, 



JACOB 51 

dusty, half-famished, Esau turned in from one 
of his hunting expeditions. And the savor 
of the pottage went to his head as intoxicatingly 
as alcohol ever goes to the head of any one. And 
Jacob narrowed his eyes, and stirred out a fresh 
cloud of fragrant steam, and waited. Then he 
named his price. Just a moment more, and 
the bargain was sealed, and Jacob had earned 
his unhappy name, "Supplanter." So the 
world's crowns pass — in moments of weakness. 
And I wonder if Jacob is ever justified in taking 
advantage of his brother's weakness — or his 
woman's, or his enemy's. They say that "all 
is fair in love and war," and particularly in 
business. Get the better of your competitor 
when he is up, or when he is down, but be 
sure to get the better of him. Why, the old 
dueling code had a kinder ethic than that. The 
challenger gave his opponent a choice of weap- 
ons; and then let him select between the weapons 
provided. I have seen a pack of dogs jump 
snarling upon the spent fox. Are we dogs or 
men? Not to take advantage of a brother's 
misfortune, not to build our house on the ruins 
of another's; not to read your right in the 
moment of a woman's weakness — this attests 
the grade of your manhood. Can you hold 



52 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

back your hand from the fruit that is yours for 
the taking? Jacob couldn't — not yet. 

But Jacob did still worse before he did better. 
I wish we might drop the curtain over the next 
scene. Jacob lent himself to his mother's 
nefarious scheme, as to the manner born. 
Frankly I do not pretend to understand 
Rebekah. Maybe there are unrecorded 
chapters which would set her fraud in softer 
light. Besides, women will go to such lengths 
for the children they have borne. But Jacob 
knew better. Any shred of manliness in him 
ought to have shrunk back from the wretched 
deceit — even though it was suggested by his 
mother. No, he put it through. And you 
see him, kneeling before his blind father, hold- 
ing out the perfidious dish, disguising his voice, 
adding falsehood to falsehood, even submitting 
to the eager kiss that was meant for another — 
and turning away with a stolen blessing. O 
Jacob, Jacob, how evil grows. Once you drove 
a shrewd bargain; now you steal and are proud. 

But the curtain falls, and when it rises again 
the scene is altered. 'Tis night, and cold; and 
the moor is desolate save for one lonely lad 
aching for his mother's arms. "The wages 
of sin is death"; and if by divine clemency 



JACOB 53 

the sentence is commuted to exile and heart- 
ache and despair, thank God. I wonder how 
the stolen blessing looked to Jacob under the 
cold light of the stars? Unrighteous gains bulk 
so much smaller when the pulse slows down. 
I do not recall any sadder picture in all the 
albums of earth than the picture of Judas 
flinging the silver pieces at the feet of his part- 
ners in crime. There is always "the moment 
after." And in the calm, dispassionate light 
of the "moment after" one has plenty of 
leisure to reappraise his sin. So I see Jacob, on 
the moor, alone, with a rock for a pillow, be- 
ginning to pay the price of his transgression. 

And the ladder. O, you must not forget 
to notice the ladder. Always the ladder ! God 
is so much kinder than we are. He lifts a 
ladder of hope by the head of a recreant man. 
If we had been furnishing Jacob with a ladder, 
it would have been a ladder leading down to the 
nethermost hell. But when God set up a 
ladder, the top of it was heaven and the foot 
was Jacob's pillow. And the redemption of a 
man has begun! We have seen the worst of 
Jacob. I do not mean that he will never 
disappoint us again. Of all irrationalities, name 
that which expects saints to be made over 



54 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

night, or in one revival season. One day a 
mother called me in to pass judgment upon 
her small boy. He had joined the church upon 
probation, and then had fallen into some old 
mischief. "Now what do you think of that 
for a Christian?" she asked while he writhed 
in misery. Honestly, I did not think well of 
it — for a Christian. But I do not need to 
think any more savagely concerning it than 
God does. Redemption begins where a man 
is, and with what he is. And only we Pharisees 
expect a leopard to change his spots. How 
can he? Stripe him like a zebra; dapple him 
like a fawn; bleach him like a polar bear, and 
you have denied God the opportunity to make 
a good leopard out of him. That is the genius 
of God — to rebuild Peter into a reliable Peter, 
to tame John and still leave him John, to con- 
vert Zacchaeus without crushing him. To 
the end of the story Jacob will continue to be 
Jacob, with the old gifts, but with a new power 
added. 

See what God had to work upon in the case of 
Jacob. Jacob was a man of dreams. That 
particular ladder in the desert was new to 
Jacob, I suppose, but dreaming was not new. 
He was always letting his soul drift out into 



JACOB 55 

new fields and new glories. I have sometimes 
thought that Jacob's special fondness for Joseph 
grew out of the discovery that the boy had his 
father's dreaming gift. You never read that 
Esau dreamed. Esau had no more imagination 
than a spider — not so much; whereas Jacob was 
always seeing things afar off. He saw more 
than Esau did in the latter's birthright, else 
had he not given up a mess of good pottage for 
it. He saw God where many another would 
have missed him. He saw victory ahead even 
when his body was broken. He saw his 
younger grandson outstripping the elder. Al- 
ways dreaming! 

O, we shall never outstrip our dreams! Tell 
me how you see yourself in your most detached 
and exalted moments, and I will show you the 
bounds you will never pass, unless God gives 
you a bigger dream. Are you fairly well satis- 
fied with yourself as you are — at two thousand 
a year, and with occasional lapses into pro- 
fanity, or revenge, or unchastity, or business 
chicanery, or what not? Then you have fixed 
the limits of achievement for yourself. God 
cannot give you anything for which you have 
not prepared yourself in your quiet moments. 
Imagine giving to an undreaming Caxton his 



56 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

printing press, or to an undreaming Fulton 
his steamboat, or to an undreaming Beethoven 
his Ninth Symphony, or to an undreaming 
Knox his loved Scotland, or to an undreaming 
Judson his converts in Burmah. Imagine God 
making of you a better man than you are in 
your waking dreams! You must change your 
dream, as Jacob did at Bethel and at Peniel. 

But Jacob had another fine quality for the 
making of a man. He was continually finding 
God. I do not mean that he was consistently 
looking for God; but he never seems to have 
been surprised to find him. "Surely the Lord 
is in this place," he confessed at Bethel, "and 
I knew it not. " But when he made the discovery 
he hailed it with joy. Somehow I cannot ima- 
gine Esau as finding God. Not once in his 
story does Esau mention God. Big game, 
disappointment, woman — all these are recorded 
in his biography, but not God. So far as Esau 
was concerned, there might have been no God. 
He was a practical atheist, for atheism does not 
consist in a vocal denial of God; atheism is 
"living as if God were dead." And this is the 
sort of atheism one finds common to-day. 
If God were to come to you, how would you 
expect him to come? If you were looking 



JACOB 57 

for him, where would you look? Just where 
you failed to look, probably. In the hesitant 
mood while you were writing that cruel letter. 
In the strange, swift nausea that came over 
you as you were planning some evil. In the 
rebuking words of a friend or the reproachful 
eyes, of a child. In love or in sorrow, in pain 
and in death, in work and in weariness. Many 
a one of you has wrestled all night, as Jacob 
did at Peniel; but without discovering, as 
Jacob did, the identity of your antagonist. 
Empty Esau of his faults and you have merely 
an empty life. Leave Jacob with his faults, 
and his aptitude for finding God, and you have 
the prophecy of a saint at the end. 

One further mark of Jacob. He was a man 
of to-morrow. He could do one of the hardest 
things we are asked to do; he could wait. 
Esau was a man of the moment; Jacob a man 
of the morrow. Most of our sins break out of 
impatience. We are in a hurry to be rich, so 
we do the dishonest thing. We are in a hurry 
to clear ourselves, so we speak the cruel word. 
We commit our sacrileges at blood-heat, where- 
as if we gave our hot blood a chance to cool, 
we should find it perfectly feasible to live on, 
and without the stains on our hands. Jacob 



58 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

was a great waiter. He would rather have a 
birthright in the future than pottage now. 
He waited seven years for Rachel, and then 
another seven to get her. He wrestled all 
night with the angel, and then, broken, still 
clung. "I will not let thee go except thou 
bless me." And see him, at the last, with his 
hands upon the heads of two grandsons, and 
a strange light in the dim eyes. Still looking 
forward for the divine arbitrament; still claim- 
ing the future at the hand of God: "The angel 
which redeemed me from destruction, bless the 
lads." And so he fell asleep. 



A SLAVERY THAT FREED— JOSEPH 

It just occurs to me that I owe Joseph an 
apology. This is my first sermon about him. 
Here I have been making sermons for more 
than twenty years; sermons on nearly all the 
great lights of both Testaments, from Adam 
to Paul, and not one on Joseph. For some 
reason I seem to have omitted him. And 
Joseph, in his early days at least, did not like 
to be omitted. In fact, I am not sure but that 
is one reason I omitted him. One enjoys assert- 
ing his independence in such matters now and 
again. And when a public figure appears to 
candidate too openly for applause, it may 
do him good — certainly it makes us feel better 
— to leave him standing, with a surprised look 
upon his face, unapplauded, so far as we are 
concerned. Long ago, before I began to build 
sermons of my own, I heard a series of sermons 
on Joseph. And I fancy I got an overdose of 
Joseph. Joseph reminds me of persimmons. 
Take him in the green, he is puckery; take him 

59 



00 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ripe, and he is almost sickishly sweet. Anyhow, 

1 never complimented him with a sermon. And 
at this late day I make him an apology. 

Eor, take him altogether, Joseph is one of 
the most winsome and commanding figures in 
the Book. Any man who can outgrow so much 
as Joseph outgrew; any man who can hold his 
own soul as straight amid the swirl of tempta- 
tion and the back-water of slander; any man 
who can forgive as royally as Joseph forgave, is 
entitled to all the compliments he is likely to 
receive in a world not yet overmuch inclined 
to generosity of praise. 

Joseph was a spoiled boy; that is the first and 
most obvious thing about him. But even that 
was not his fault so much as his misfortune. 
Boys do not "spoil" themselves, any more 
than other pets do. Perhaps there are some 
dogs you cannot spoil, though I never knew one. 
And there may be boys whom indulgence and 
flattery cannot hurt, but I am sure they are 
rare. Joseph's clay must have been mixed 
with celestial elements if his father's frank 
favoritism left the lad uninjured. Joseph was 
a favorite son. As the Record puts it, Jacob 
"loved Joseph more than all his children." 
He was Rachel's boy, and Rachel was dead. 



JOSEPH 61 

Perhaps if Rachel had lived — ? But who 
knows? I have seen as many mother-spoiled 
as father-spoiled children. Rachel's own life 
went out when Joseph's younger brother came 
into the world — which might have seemed an 
excuse for spoiling Benjamin. Yet Jacob loved 
Joseph better even than Benjamin. Who can 
understand such things, and who is proof 
against them? I have heard parents say, 
times without number, that they had no favor- 
ites among their children; that each was as 
dear as any of the others. And I, for one, do 
not believe it. I do not believe that such per- 
fect equipoise is possible. The ways of love 
are as baffling as the ways of the wind or 
"sport-colors" among flowers. You can no 
more control the impulse of the heart than you 
can "bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades." 
You may conceal your partiality — please God 
— but you cannot help it or kill it. 

The transmission of wireless messages is 
conditioned upon a certain delicate accord 
between the sending and the receiving instru- 
ments. All other messages are wasted upon 
the air. But let the instruments be properly 
attuned, each to the other, and the message 
traverses seas and continents to tick itself 



62 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

out in throbbing syllables. So with the human 
heart. Love all your children? Of course 
you do. For any one of them would you yield 
up your life, either in quickened pulse-beats, 
or in a single breathless act of supreme self- 
sacrifice. But between one particular child 
and yourself — as between friend and friend, 
or between lover and mate — there is a mys- 
tical sympathy not of your own making. And 
when the heart of that particular child cries 
to yours, you answer as you can to no other. 

And so I do not blame Jacob for loving Jo- 
seph best. I do not think he could help doing 
that any more than we can help loving sunsets 
and rainbows. All I blame Jacob for is the^ 
unwise and disparaging exhibition of his love — 
for example, in the gift of a coat of many colors. 
That was too much, even for the loyal Reuben. 
It was the flaming advertisement of a fact 
which the brothers would have been glad to 
deny. You know there are some things one 
can stand until they get into print, or into 
the public eye. Injustice, perfidy, infidelity of 
lover or friend — you may bear these things so 
long as the secret remains between you and 
God. But with some flaunting of the sin your 
own soul breaks into indignant flame. I can 



JOSEPH 63 

imagine, then, the effect, upon the brothers, 
of this parti-colored coat. It made them hot 
and cold by turns. Especially — ! 

And here we find still further aggravation 
of the case. Have you considered the effect 
upon Joseph? Maybe, if he could have worn 
the coat modestly — or permitted his brothers 
to wear it occasionally! But 'tis so hard to 
keep one's head level while honor is being 
paid. Really, I do not think that the mere 
possession of riches by one man sets his brother 
against him. It is the flaunting of riches; the 
hideous arrogance of riches. One man drives 
his car in such fashion that his pedestrian neigh- 
bors are glad he owns it; another man drives 
in such fashion that they wish it would kill him. 
Suppose you have a college diploma, or an 
honored name which you inherited, or a special 
gift with pen or voice — is anything gained by 
making everybody else hate you for having it? 
O, to be so modest with any honor, that the 
world is glad we won it! Only a yellow dog 
would begrudge Miss Grace Dodge her million, 
or Phillips Brooks his eloquence, or Alice Free- 
man Palmer her scholarship, or Paul his vision. 
They used their special advantages so unob- 
trusively. 



64 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

O, Joseph, Joseph! "Noblesse oblige." It 
obligates you to wear that many-colored coat 
not as an earning but as a gift. Nay, it sum- 
mons you to play the brother's part with pecul- 
iar industry and unselfishness. Always "no- 
blesse oblige"! By so much as we are better 
born, or better educated, or better circum- 
stanced, or better loved than others are, we 
owe them partnership. This was Paul's great 
creed. "I am debtor," he says; but to whom? 
Notice, for one of the world's dearest hopes lies 
in recognition of a similar debt on the part of 
the fortunate. Paul confessed himself debtor 
not only to his teachers, his benefactors, and 
his Lord, but to all who had less than he — 
the poor, the ignorant, the disobedient chil- 
dren of his Father. Some day we shall espouse 
that wonderful creed, and the gates of the 
New City will be within view. 

But notice another characteristic of the 
youthful Joseph. I regret to mention it, but 
it is part of the story. Joseph was a talebearer. 
In the first descriptive verse concerning him 
this appears: "And Joseph brought unto his 
father their evil report." Maybe he was a 
faithful reporter. Even so, I feel ashamed of 
him. There is no meaner trade on earth than 



JOSEPH 65 

the trade of the talebearer. And if Joseph 
often plied the trade, I can understand why his 
brothers hated him. One of the most oppro- 
brious epithets a child can apply to another is 
"tattletale." And I do not think we ever 
quite outgrow our loathing for the vocation, 
even when we are guilty of practicing it. If 
all the things we tell were true — which they 
seldom are — still we ought to wear sackcloth 
and| ashes for repeating them. How long 
since the sheer truth of a story became warrant 
for telling it? God teach us artistry instead of 
dissection in the telling of "whatsoever things 
are true"! But the case is more serious still. 
How seldom do we hear a whole story. We 
get our gossip in fragments so small that any 
but a cruel industry would despair of ever put- 
ting them together. We see with one eye and 
hear with one ear, and then supply the gaps 
from a fund of imagination. 
1 I wonder if Jacob encouraged Joseph to 
bring in his stories. You know that gossip 
never travels far except as it finds ready hear- 
ers. The old fashioned tinder-box contained 
three articles: a piece of steel, a flake of flint, 
and some inflammable material. Lacking any 
one of the three, you could not build a fire. 



66 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

So with gossip. The cold steel of an unkind 
tongue may strike patiently; but unless you 
provide the willing flint of a receptive ear, and 
the material for combustion, there will be no 
fire. I have known people to whom you could 
not repeat an unkind story. Even if you suc- 
ceeded in getting the words out, they seemed to 
be quenched in the sea of a beautiful compas- 
sion. O, to be that kind of folks! Love 
"thinketh no evil," or if it thinks evil, it never 
says so, even with a malicious eye. Jacob 
could have cut short the tattling of his boy with 
a word or a look. 

But the dreams of Joseph! At first they 
were all about himself. Like his waking 
thoughts, so were his dreaming fancies. 'Twas 
his sheaf of wheat to which the others paid 
obeisance. 'Twas he to whom all the heavenly 
bodies gave their homage. Always Joseph 
the spoiled boy! Not long ago I heard a tiny 
child counting: "Number one," she said, 
"number one." Then a pause and she began 
again: "Number one." She could not seem 
to remember the next of the cardinals. So 
far as I know she is still repeating, "Number 
one." Some day she will learn the rest of the 
series; through pain or grief or weariness she 



JOSEPH 67 

will learn. Meantime she is full sister of a 
"multitude that no man can number" whose 
arithmetic stops with their "number one." 
Such a man was Joseph — until the change. 
Joseph learned — but in what bitter school! 

Suddenly the scene shifts, and the wind 
blows chill. Exasperation had reached the 
breaking point with the brothers. They were 
tired of a spoiled boy's tattling. They had 
heard all they proposed to hear of his imper- 
tinent dreams. They were sick of the sight 
of his many-colored coat. So one day they 
caught him, and handled him roughly — but 
every child knows the story better than he 
knows the details of any battle of Revolution. 
Egypt for Joseph! 'Twas a hard bed they 
made for him, but not harder, perhaps, than 
he deserved. And most boys need the hard 
bed in order to set them awake that they may 
see the stars. Like his great-grandfather Abra- 
ham, and his father Jacob; like most of the men 
and women who have learned to bless the 
world, Joseph had to be driven forth. I do 
not think he would have gone of his own voli- 
tion. He would have stayed at home, and 
dreamed about his own greatness, and repeated 
the small talk of the neighborhood — and re- 



68 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

mained a prig. The spoiled boy would have 
grown to be a spoiled man. But the good God 
had better thoughts for Joseph than Joseph 
had for himself. And, under God, Egypt 
made him. O, look: for you cannot afford to 
miss the transfiguring lesson just here. I say 
Egypt made him. It is not that he succeeded 
in spite of Egypt. Egypt gave him his oppor- 
tunity. Egypt tested his manhood until he 
acquired moral muscle. Egypt gave him wor- 
thy fulfillment of his dreams. You cannot 
write the life story of Joseph and omit Egypt. 
If he saved her, Egypt also saved him — 
just as heartaches and loneliness, as frustration 
and starless nights have saved many another, 
since. 

I have no soft words for Joseph's brethren. 
What they did to him was conceived in jealousy 
and born in hate. The last intention they had 
was to help Providence remake their detested 
brother. No, they were frankly bitter, and all 
but murderous. But what an infinitely sadder 
world this would be if God had no skill in 
making use of the hatreds of men and their dia- 
bolical plots ! " My God," cried a modern saint, 
in bewildering surprise, "I have never thanked 
thee for my thorn." Notice, please: thanks 



JOSEPH 69 

for it. Not thanks for deliverance from the 
thorn; nor yet thanks for abundant compen- 
sation, but thanks for the thorn itself. Would 
Beethoven have heard so many celestial har- 
monies if he had not been deaf? Would Rob- 
ert South have preached so potently with an 
unbroken body? Do you believe that Paul 
would have rendered such a peerless service 
to his Lord unless he had been driven to earth 
in shame on the Damascus road? Under God, 
Egypt helped make these men. And you? 
Is there no treasure you would have missed 
if your way had never led through Egypt? 
Is there no star whose gleam you first saw 
in the night of Egyptian darkness? 

Joseph had one experience well calculated to 
shake his faith in God and man and woman. 

"Heaven has no woe like love to hatred turned, 
, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." 

And the flames of one woman's fury nearly 
cost Joseph his life. He found that sometimes 
the way of the saint may be harder than the 
"way of the transgressor." He went to prison 
with the hideous stain of an imputed guilt. 
Goodness did not seem to pay, as I have heard 
many a sufferer confess. But God rules in 
Egypt also; and under the providence of God, 



70 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Joseph's bitterest experience gave birth to a 
new joy. Under God, Egypt made him. 

First it helped him to find himself. Strange 
to say, the discovery of himself is often the latest 
discovery a man makes. If David Living- 
stone had been a different sort of man, he might 
have located the head-waters of the Nile before 
he really located his own soul. There are 
reasons for believing that Cortez opened up 
a new continent without opening up the best 
man within himself. One of our most brilliant 
inventors has evidently not yet discovered him- 
self to be the son of God. But what boots 
any other find as compared with the import- 
ance of finding oneself? "What shall it profit 
a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and 
lose his own soul?" There used to be in 
Boston a bureau charged with the business of 
helping young men and women discover to 
themselves the thing they could best do in the 
world. God conducts such a bureau — even 
in Egypt. 'Twas in the Egypt of the "far 
country" that the prodigal found himself. 
'Twas in Egypt that Joseph found himself. 

And in Egypt he found his brothers. He had 
never known them before as brothers — nor 
they him. Under the home roof they saw 



JOSEPH 71 

faults only, in each other. But in Egypt he 
really found them, to love and to serve. There 
are few more beautiful stories than the story 
of that finding. Tender, startling, intense — 
what a story it is! Go home and read it again, 
till your eyes moisten and your heart grows 
warm. Egypt brought them together for the 
residue of their days, just as it constantly does. 
Pain gives us our friend more surely and gra- 
ciously than plenty does. In the deepening 
shade of twilight we come to search each oth- 
er's eyes. Danger drives us shoulder to shoul- 
der—till we find our brother — in fine linen 
or in overalls. - 

And, lastly, Egypt helped Joseph to find a 
new use for his gifts. In the homeland he had 
dreamed about himself, but in bondage he 
learned to dream for others. Once he saw him- 
self master. Now he saw himself serving. 
'Twas a new Joseph into whose eyes his broth- 
ers looked, in Egypt. The prig had become 
the man. 

And so we leave him — with his eyes strain- 
ing toward the land of his birth. "And Jo- 
seph took an oath of the children of Israel, 
saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall 
carry up my bones from hence." What a 



72 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

look! What a faith! What a golden hope! 
Egypt was not home; Canaan was home. 
By and by Joseph was going home. He was 
sure of it, because he was "very sure of God." 
He could trust the future. Centuries must 
intervene, but Joseph's bones were to be car- 
ried home, as his heart had already gone. 




VI 
THE MOUNTAIN-MAN— MOSES 

From Joseph to Moses — reckoned in years, 
the interval was long — more than a century. 
But that is merely calendar-reckoning. And 
you cannot measure soul-time by sun-time. 
When your heart is glad, an hour seems but a 
moment; and when your heart is heavy, hours 
lengthen into years. For my part, I have never 
been able to lay up against a child his poor esti- 
mates of time. It is exasperating, of course, 
to have him late at meals, or cut short his 
study-hours. But the explanation is both pro- 
found and beautiful. A child reckons time 
in terms of the heart, just as God does, for 
does not the Record say that "one day is with 
the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand 
years as one day"? The child does not know 
any more about the metaphysician's category 
of "time" than we do when our hearts are 
involved, either for joy or for pain. 

So, I say, we must not expect to measure, in 

years, the gap. between Joseph and Moses. 

73 



74 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Even the records have been lost, like most of 
the diaries of the heart. What days we have 
most eagerly watched for the deliverance that 
failed to come! What nights we have spent 
calling through the darkness for an answering 
look, or "the sound of a voice that is still"! — 
of all this the world knows nothing, nor needs 
to. No complete history of a life or a nation 
has ever been published. But the weariness 
of waiting! Perhaps you have seen the picture 
of a mother fallen asleep in her chair; telltale 
lines in her face; and the shadow of such a look 
of yearning; and the tallow from the candle 
she still held, spilling over and dabbing her 
dress. "Waiting for my boy," is the title of the 
picture. And some waiting mothers cannot 
even find the balm of sleep ! Or, shall I remind 
you of another waiting; waiting while men 
drowned their souls in the brew; waiting while 
women drank full cups of tears; waiting while 
lads and lassies went pinched and frightened — 
and worse. We do not need to open the Bible 
to learn what Egyptian bondage is like. We 
have had it. We have been under the lash 
of a modern Pharaoh. We have been required 
to make "bricks without straw." And only 
the most fragmentary part of the story has been 



MOSES 75 

recorded, on police-blotters, and in asylums 
and in open destitution. The rest of the record 
has been lost — like the history of Israel in 
Egypt, while she waited for deliverance to 
come. 

And when deliverance came, it came by a man. 
I do not know how Israel expected deliverance 
to come. We have such hasty and nonde- 
script dreams of emancipation. People talk 
airily about the better days ahead, or piously 
about the redemptions which God is certain 
to work, as if redemptions dropped out of the 
sky. 

"lis God gives skill, but not without men's hands." 
"He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violin without An- 
tonio." 

All the redemptions of earth are wrought 
by or through men and women. You cannot 
name any movement for human betterment but 
had its impulse in a human heart, and its con- 
summation by human hands. God, evidently, 
can manage the weather without aid from us. 
Seedtime and harvest — these he looks after 
personally; all we can do is to time our opera- 
tions to his. He holds this planet in leash in 
its wonderful flight through space. But the 
kind of government we enjoy upon its surface; 



76 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the sort of cities we build and trains we travel 
in; the brotherliness we practice one toward 
another — these things are distinctly "up to 



us." 



We have not yet learned to estimate highly 
enough the potency of a man — one man or one 
woman to change the face of the world we live 
in. We have a fairly definite idea of the power 
of particles of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpeter, 
scientifically combined. We expect them to 
split open rocks or to carry a cannon ball ten 
miles. We pay compliments to the fructify- 
ing value of a seed. Thirty, sixty, a hundred- 
fold is the result we expect. But the potency 
of a man? We are still dubious about that, in 
everyday practice. We put a price on his 
labor; call him worth three dollars per day, 
or ten thousand per year, according to his voca- 
tion. Nay, we even put a price on his head 
when we talk about the economic wastage of 
industrialism or war. We say that every time 
a man's life is cut off the community loses, say, 
three thousand dollars' worth of productivity. 
But man as an earth-mover; man as the changer 
of the moral climate of a neighborhood; man 
as a worker of brilliant redemptions among 
men — of him we have heard comparatively 



MOSES 77 

little. Or, at least, we only half believe what 
we hear. We still incline to gaze up at the 
stars or out across the hills when some hateful 
bondage needs to be broken. 

And still, as of old, God works his deliver- 
ances by human instruments. Luther and 
Protestantism, Wesley and Methodism, Gari- 
baldi and united Italy, Florence Nightingale 
and Red Cross work, Abraham Lincoln and 
emancipation — these, in a way, are synonyms. 
Cancel out the men and you cancel out the 
movements. Nothing of such human conse- 
quence "happens." It is wrought in human 
blood and tears and travail. God prepares 
the man, but man does the work. Else it re- 
mains undone. One day Carlyle cried out in 
bitterness, "God sits in heaven and does noth- 
ing." Carlyle was wrong: the real trouble 
is that men sit on earth and do nothing worthy 
of God and themselves. 

So I come back to my story — the story of 
one man, the story of the son of a slave. By 
such an one came deliverance to slaves. Such 
a humble beginning of deliverance! Do you 
recall how Stephen puts it in the sermon which 
cost him his life? Recounting the bitter days 
of Egyptian bondage, he says, "in which time 



78 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Moses was born." Nothing spectacular, noth- 
ing noisy, nothing portentous — merely an every- 
day event: the birth of a baby destined for 
the river if Pharaoh had his way. Just a little 
child, like the Abraham born in a Kentucky 
cabin in 1809; like the Cromwell of the brew- 
er's house in England; like Charles Lamb, who 
saw the light in the servants' quarters; nay, 
like that Babe over whom the angels sang 
carols, nineteen centuries ago. 

"They all were looking for a King, 

To slay their foes and set them high; 
Thou earnest, a little baby-thing 
That made a woman cry." 

O, women, women ! talk about other honors as 
compared with the honor of holding in your fond 
arms a potential deliverer. You do not know. 
Moses's mother did not know. God knows. 
And that unnamed mother stifled her cries, 
and shivered with fear, and, like a lioness, hid 
her whelp for three months. Then you see him 
in his strange cradle, kissed away to sleep 
for his eventful voyage, just as mothers, from 
time immemorial, have kissed their bairns away 
to sleep, never certain on which further shore 
the ark may find haven. 

Everybody knows the pretty sequel — how the 



MOSES 79 

canny child was found by the monarch's daugh- 
ter, and, in an access of womanly pity, farmed 
out to its own mother to nurse. God bless the 
unnamed princess of the house of Pharaoh! 
Was it sheer womanliness, or a hidden wound 
in the heart, or the longing for the soft arms 
of a child, or what, prompted her deed? At 
least she found the man-child who would yet 
wrench her father's throne. And she would 
have been less than woman if she had not pre- 
ferred to see a throne wrenched than a baby 
killed. Moses was her foundling. She gave 
him the name by which he is known to all ages. 
She was the only mother he ever knew. She 
trained him, unwitting, for God. 

Here the story breaks off. Some chapters 
that would make interesting reading are gone. 
And when the narrative begins again, Moses 
has outgrown both his foster-mother's arms 
and the court of Pharaoh. In my boyhood 
days they used to tell a story of a child cap- 
tured and carried off by Indians to their 
camp. All his boyhood and young manhood 
were spent in the wigwam. He lived their life 
and danced their war-dances. To all prac- 
tical intent he became an Indian. And when, 
later, he was released and taken home to his 



80 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

kind, his heart cried disconsolately back to the 
tepee and the trail. And one day, with a great 
cry, he was gone. I remember how my hair 
used to rise over the recital. But a greater 
story is here, with a sublimer truth to teach. 
Moses also went back. But when he went 
back he went clear back to the beginning. 
He never was deeply the child of Pharaoh's 
court. He was the child of that unnamed He- 
brew mother, and of a persecuted race. Above 
the blare of the trumpets of the palace he heard 
the groanings of his people. Just beyond the 
gates he saw hunger and pain. Egypt varnished 
him, but his grain was Hebrew. And one day 
the court knew him no more, save as its foe. 

No, I do not like the way he began his work 
as deliverer. It was too crass and aimless. 
But I can understand the heat of it. And I 
can forgive men for heat more easily than for 
frost. It is said that, with his first sight of a 
slave on the auction block, Lincoln observed 
aloud, as concerning the institution which 
practiced such wickedness, "If I ever get the 
chance, I will hit that thing hard." Thank 
God, that when he had the chance he remem- 
bered his promise. So many people forget 
their vows when they come to ease and com- 



MOSES 81 

fort. Has the trail of the serpent of the saloon 
never passed your door? Have you never 
broken your heart over a booze-crazed relative, 
or watched the divine light fade out of the face 
of your friend under the blight of his cups? 
Do you owe King Alcohol nothing hotter than 
mild protest or watchful waiting? Deliber- 
ately, prayerfully, I am seeking to stir your 
one-time sense of outrage. You have a chance 
to hit hard — a lawful, honorable chance to hit 
hard. You are not invited to participate in 
an abortive vengeance, like Carrie Nation's 
saloon fixture-smashing campaign, or John 
Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry, or Moses's 
murder of the first brutal Egyptian he met. 
In a perfectly legitimate, fair-to-all contest 
you are asked to give tardy vent to your own 
moral heat, and hit hard. God forgive you if 
you dare to "hit soft." 

But Moses. Under the circumstances, I am 
experiencing some difficulty in opening up my 
theme. Moses's first exhibition of moral heat 
was temperamental. He was always a gusty 
man. He had hard work to keep his temper. 
'Twas in a fit of temper he dashed the stone 
tables in pieces on the hillside. In temper he 
struck the rock at Meribah. And in temper 



82 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

he hit his first blow for emancipation. I do 
not know that it is always possible to distin- 
guish clearly between righteous indignation and 
the other kind. But the chances are at least 
ten to one that your particular outbreak is as 
simon-pure cussedness as the squalling and 
kicking of a bad-tempered child. The longer 
I live, the less inclined I am to believe in the 
hallowed quality of the ordinary outburst of 
anger. The subject is not fighting for God 
at all; he is merely striking back. 'Tis a 
jungle mood — for which we pay dearly in the 
end. 

Do you recall how it happened that Moses 
was not permitted to set foot in the land 
toward which he so wisely and triumphantly 
led his people? You recall the fact: do you 
recall the why? Because, one day, in the 
wilderness, bristling with self-importance, 
Moses let his temper fly. Say that he had fair 
justification. Say that you would have done 
the same thing. But also say that Moses wore 
ball and chain for the rest of his days, and could 
not put his foot the other side of Jordan. We 
are never called upon to fight the devil with 
the devil's weapons. "Put up thy sword," 
called Jesus to the gusty Peter. "Not by 



MOSES 83 

might nor by power" — that is, not by un- 
hallowed might nor by unjust power — "but 
by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." Moses 
had to learn that. 

So the story breaks off again; and for forty 
years we almost lose sight of our man. One 
piece of kindness on his part and his subsequent 
marriage are all that remain from the long 
years in Midian. But no schooling is too long, 
provided we learn our lesson. Moses learned. 
He learned that there is all the difference in the 
world between the "call of the blood" and the 
calling of God. It was the call of the blood he 
obeyed when he killed the Egyptian and hid 
the body in the sand. It was the call of God 
that gave him his real commission. Nobody 
can afford to run ahead of that. At any cost 
Moses had to learn self-control and reverence. 
And what an altered man we see veiling his face 
before a burning furze-bush at Horeb's foot. 
I do not suppose that, ten years earlier, God 
could have said so much in flaming forests as 
he now said in one humble bush to Moses. 

"Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush aflame with God: 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes." 

Moses had learned to see. 



84 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Have you? Do you know when God is talk- 
ing to you? Can you distinguish between his 
accent and the ordinary small-talk of the 
street and the shop? You know what friends 
think you ought to do. Maybe they are right. 
You know what I think you ought to do. 
Maybe I am right. But your real business is 
to discover what God wants you to do. Moses 
was sure he could not perform so big a task. 
Moses did, however. And so can you achieve 
whatever God lays upon you as your personal 
work. God never expects fishes to fly — or, if 
he does, he creates a flying fish. He does not 
ask squirrels to build beaver-dams. Nor does 
he demand from us anything more unreason- 
able. What he asks we can: whether to vote 
an unusual ticket, or to bear pain without whin- 
ing, or to speak a good word for the Lord Jesus. 

Moses did what he said he never could do. 
I wish there were time to describe the greatness 
of his work. He led a race out of bondage, and 
fitted them for freedom. He taught them 
temple mysteries which we still revere. He 
gave them a polity which, in some respects, 
we have not yet caught up with. He laid 
upon them commandments which after thou- 
sands of years are the groundwork of an uni- 



MOSES 85 

versal ethic. Civilization falls apart of its 
own weight where the Ten Commandments are 
violated. "Thou shalt not kill . . . Thou 
shalt not commit adultery . . . Thou shalt 
not steal . . . Thou shalt not covet" — these 
do not need to be graven on stone to-day. They 
are wrought in the fibers of the souls of men. 
And when men break the commandments their 
own souls protest. 

Again the years pass — crowded years, event- 
ful years, momentous years. Moses's work was 
done, and God himself gave him sepulture. 
Let me quote from the Record just as it reads: 
"And Moses went up ... to the top of Pis- 
gah, . . . And the Lord showed him all the 
land. . . . And the Lord said unto him, This 
is the land. ... I have caused thee to see 
it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over 
thither. So Moses . . . died there in the land 
of Moab, . . . And he buried him in a valley 
. « . but no man knoweth of his sepulcher 
unto this day." "Now he belongs to the 
ages," whispered Stanton as he turned from 
the bed of the dead Lincoln. In peculiar sense 
is that true of Moses. No people can ever 
claim his place of burial. He belongs to the 
ages and to men everywhere. 



vn 



WHAT CONSTITUTES A MAJORITY- 
JOSHUA 

"Joshua, the son of Nun." But even with 
that bit of pedigree added, my store of informa- 
tion is not particularly increased. For I never 
heard of his father. And if I had? One day 
a man rang my doorbell and was duly an- 
nounced as "Mr. Blank." Greetings over, we 
sat down to the business in hand. Needless 
to say, I knew well enough what the business 
was likely to be. He might as well have worn 
a placard: "In pressing need of assistance." 
But that was not what he said at first. What 
he said was, "I suppose you have often heard 
of my father." Truth to tell, I hadn't. He 
looked rather ashamed of me for such confes- 
sion of ignorance, but my ignorance was com- 
plete; I had never even heard of his father. 
Except upon general principles I should not 
have been sure that he ever had a father. 
Naturally, I supposed so, but, at least, I had 

not happened to hear of him. 

86 



JOSHUA 87 

Suppose I had heard of him? And suppose, 
further, that the father were a bishop or a 
senator or a multimillionaire? The fact would 
only serve to aggravate the case of the man 
before me. I have not yet quite made up my 
mind whether a famous father is an asset or a 
liability to the son. Not long ago I was intro- 
duced, with many adjectives, as the "son of 
So and So." Frankly, notwithstanding my love 
and reverence for my father, I wished the intro- 
ducer had omitted that part of his introduction. 
I could not fly with my father's wing, or even 
walk with his stride. I could do only my own 
piece of work in my own way; and to have it 
compared, in advance, with another's work 
increased the chances of invidious distinction. 

The prime question always is how well you 
can do your day's work. Never mind who your 
father was; whether you are proud of him or 
ashamed. What are you worth to the world? 
Can you fill your place as well as he filled his? 
Or better, perhaps, in case he was careless? 
I do not think God will ever ask who your 
father was, or your mother — God bless her! — 
except for the purpose of reminding you how 
much you have to live up to, or to outgrow. 
Joshua, the son of Nun." No, I never heard 



88 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

of the father. But for that matter, I cannot 
name the father of Joshua's great chief, Moses. 
And I cannot recall, if indeed I ever heard, the 
baptismal name of Oliver Cromwell's father. 
And, for that matter, who, during the latest 
Presidential campaign, stopped particularly 
to inquire who Wilson's father was, or the 
father of Hughes? Or, if I speak of mothers, 
remember that 'twas the gaunt hand of Abra- 
ham Lincoln which wrote the name of Nancy 
Hanks upon the stars. So, I do not care about 
the pedigree of Joshua. Who was Joshua? 

Well, to begin with, he was not Moses. I 
make that absurdly obvious statement be- 
cause if it were really obvious, many of us 
would be very much happier than we are. 
I mean that Joshua is always in danger of 
being judged by the grade of Moses, and fre- 
quently ends if he does not begin by wishing 
he were Moses. It took me years to learn to be 
willing to do my work in my own way. I 
wanted to do my work as my father did his, or 
as other men did theirs. When I heard them 
preach I felt numbed by the contrast. When 
I saw converts fill their altars I wondered if 
God ever called me to preach his gospel. And 
when I tasted the flavor of their scholarship my 



JOSHUA 89 

books looked like primers. No man can do 
his best work until he settles his soul in the con- 
viction that no two men are ever called to do 
the same thing in the same way. "Compari- 
sons are odious" — and even worse than that. 
They are usually unfair. They leave out of 
account the essential and permanent differences 
between men. One recalls the disparaging 
comment made by Lincoln's father over the 
boy: "He can't sing like you, Nancy." No, 
he couldn't. I do not know that he could, as 
we say, "carry a tune." Suppose, then, that 
he had gone out into life smarting with a sense 
of inferiority because he had not inherited his 
mother's voice? Why, then, he would have 
denied himself use of a still higher gift than 
hers. For, as the dying mother prophesied, 
the boy who, confessedly, could not "sing like 
Nancy" might yet learn to make a multitude 
of others sing. And the freedom-song of a race 
is the song he inspired who could not "sing 
like Nancy." 

"To thine own self be true." That is — and 
in a sense not intended by the poet — be true 
to your own equipment, true to your personal 
appointment. "That which each can do best 
only his Maker can teach him." I do not min- 



90 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ify the importance of example. There must 
be models and patterns, of course. But as in 
art, so in life, each man must reserve to himself, 
each must claim for himself the right to "draw 
the thing as he sees it for the God of things as 
they are." During school days children write 
so much alike that often you can hardly dis- 
tinguish the penmanship of one from that of 
another. All plainly reveal the marks of the 
"copy." But as life broadens and deepens, 
as the frosts of sorrow chill and the fires of 
ambition burn the fingers, the handwriting 
steadily changes until it becomes personal, 
individuated. Pity the man who after twenty 
or forty years still writes like the copy book; 
and pity still more fervently the man who 
at the end of twenty or forty years has not 
learned to trust himself, at his best. Joshua 
was not Moses. I hope he never wasted time 
trying to be. He was molded of different clay. 
His training was different — narrower, if you 
please: no burning bush, no budding rod, no 
smoking mount. Compared with Moses, he 
was, as Antony described himself, "a plain, 
blunt man" who spoke that he did know, 
and did that which he knew how to do. Prob- 
ably he could not have led an exodus, and had 



JOSHUA 91 

no genius for religion, and might have passed 
God on the street without recognizing him. 
But, on the other hand, he was steady where 
his chief was gusty. And in the event he 
achieved a result impossible to the other. 

I want to study him with you. First, as 
the man who could obey orders. He seems 
to have had a gift which most people might 
well envy — the gift of obedience. I suppose 
that to be able to give orders is mark of a higher 
rank than the ability to obey orders. But to 
obey orders is frequently a harder task than to 
give orders. And, for the average man, far 
more important. Few are called to be masters; 
most are called to serve. You will hear it said, 
and not by way of compliment, that "Negroes 
make good servants." What we mean is that 
Negroes are not fitted to be other than ser- 
vants. But, passing over the sneer, I beg to 
remind you that it is a great thing to be a 
"good servant." If you reread the story of 
Joshua, you will find him referred to, time and 
again, as "the servant of Moses"; "Joshua 
the servant of Moses." (That was before the 
enlightened days in which the ordinary young 
woman would rather work in a factory, at star- 
vation wages, and sleep in an attic than be 



92 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

known as a "servant".) Joshua was a great 
servant. He had a genius for taking orders. 
You could depend upon him to do what he was 
set to do. He could carry his "message to 
Garcia." 

Obedience? We are not even requiring it 
from our children as our parents exacted it 
from us. We hate to seem harsh; and we hate 
still more fervently to be bothered — with re- 
sult that multitudes of children are growing 
up to do practically as they please. If they 
wheedle enough, or yell loud enough, or refuse 
to eat, they will get their way. And what kind 
of servant of men or God will that soul make 
who has not learned obedience in childhood? 
What kind of master unless he first found how 
to serve? Of the greatest son of women the 
Record declares that he "took upon him the 
form of a servant, . . . and humbled himself 
and became obedient." We call him "Master," 
but he called himself "servant." Nay he is 
Master because he served so divinely. 

But Joshua: look again and you will see a 
man who could fight heroically even when 
neither the power nor the glory of the battle 
was his. Few of us can do that. If we do a 
piece of kindness, we want it known as ours. 



JOSHUA 93 

If we carry a cup of cold water, we hope some- 
body will meet us on the way. If we are brave, 
we crave witnesses. Even if we are merely 
chaste and honest, we like full credit for such 
virtues. This modest function of "blushing 
unseen" does not appeal to us — not to many of 
us. Take away the eyes of the world, and our 
standards would droop pathetically. Why, 
even a boy will skate better and study more 
diligently when he has spectators. So com- 
paratively little is done "for the joy of the 
working," and so much for the joy of ap- 
plause! 

Joshua was different, if we may judge him 
by the Record. Take his first public appear- 
ance. It was at the battle of Rephidim. And 
he fought gallantly. But the honors of victory 
came not to him. He was merely an instru- 
ment in the hand of a greater — and when the 
fight is won you do not crown the gun: you 
crown the gunner. See that old man on the 
hilltop watching — and praying. The old man 
is Moses. And the hands he lifts are hands 
of supplication. And every time the aged 
hands droop Joshua is beaten back. And 
when the hands go aloft again Joshua gains. 
Until, finally, with Hur on one side and Aaron 



94 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

on the other, the puissant hands are held up 
and the battle is won. 

"Pray as if everything depended upon God: 
work as if everything depended upon you." 
There are many folks who can do the former. 
They can "pray as if everything depended upon 
God." 'Tis easier to do that, and less expen- 
sive. But to "work as if everything depended 
upon you," especially when you know it doesn't, 
calls for a very different quality of man- 
hood. And here lay Joshua's genius. He 
was dependent upon the man on the hill, and 
the God over all. The best he could do would 
be vain apart from unseen resources. Yet he 
fought his fight as desperately as if there were 
no God in heaven and no Moses on the hill. 
Can you do that? Can you work just as assid- 
uously for love as for wages? Can you bear 
just as much for the glory of a clean con- 
science as for the glory of popular mention? 
Can you fight just as valiantly for the sake of 
winning the battle as for the sake of wearing the 
Iron Cross? Few of us can — as yet. But the path 
lies that way; and some day, after we have sat 
often and long enough at the feet of Jesus Christ, 
we shall strike the trail. All honor to Joshua; he 
could fight without the power or the glory. 



JOSHUA 95 

Look at him again: he was a man who was 
not ashamed to be counted with the minority. 
Everybody recalls the circumstance. Joshua 
was one of twelve delegates appointed to pros- 
pect the new land. And, mark you, the grapes 
he and Caleb saw were no larger than the 
grapes seen by the other ten; nor were the 
inhabitants any less belligerent than those 
seen by the majority. The difference was in 
the delegates themselves. But nearly every- 
body hates to be outvoted; and I almost marvel 
that Joshua did not move to make the adverse 
vote unanimous. The chances were five to 
one that Caleb and Joshua were wrong; so 
the matter looked when worked out by arith- 
metic. But there are so many questions that 
cannot be settled by arithmetic. None of the 
great issues of the heart, none of the great 
problems of brotherhood, none of the supreme 
destinies of men, can be settled by figures. 
Majorities determine nothing except that five 
apples are more than four. God has had to start 
all his redemptive movements small — so small 
that wise ones laughed at the folly. He has 
glorified the minority, again and again, by 
committing to it majesties and kingdoms 
which the majority missed. 



96 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

O, no, I am not passing flowers to the crabbed 
mortal who glories in his minority vote, and 
would rather stick to his point than turn the 
light upon it. As I said a moment ago, the 
chances were five to one that Caleb and Joshua 
were wrong. And whenever you set yourself, 
one to five, against the majority, you need a 
better justification than is supplied by sheer 
obduracy or quixotism. Stubbornness proves 
nothing — except that a mule is a difficult 
partner. Only he who has caught the splendor 
of open vision, or felt in his soul the throb of 
redemptive purpose, has any right to assume 
that the majority are wrong. Joshua was a 
gentleman. You never hear him calling the 
majority hard names, as some of us incline to 
do when we are outvoted. Nor did he make 
light of the difficulties in the way. He merely 
joined with Caleb in the beautiful assurance 
that the land of promise was theirs for the tak- 
ing. Who was right — judged by the Record? 

But turn the pages rapidly and see Joshua 
again, this time at Jericho; this time as the 
man who could do an apparently ridiculous 
thing at the divine command. If ever a be- 
sieging army disregarded the rules of war, 
Joshua's army did before Jericho. All they 



JOSHUA 97 

did was to march around the city, day after 
day, for six days, and on the seventh day, seven 
times, and at the last circuit to shout at the 
sound of the trumpets — and the walls of the 
city collapsed. So the story goes. And I, for 
one, do not pretend to understand it. You 
may make anything out of it you please. You 
may posit earthquake, or insurrection, or 
what you will. I never knew any walls to fall 
at the sound of trumpets and singing, though 
I have listened to horn-blowing and vocaliza- 
tion which made me wish the walls might fall 
and silence the musicians. What impresses 
me in the Record is the willingness of Joshua 
to appear foolish, if need be, for the sake of a 
victory. There must have been counselors to 
tell him how foolish he was, just as there are 
to-day when we break with the world's usual 
methods. We have so much dignity to consult; 
and some people would as little know what to do 
without their heads as without their dignity. 
And so we take orders from the god of this 
world rather than from the God of the ages. 

" Fools for Christ's sake," said the great 
apostle. Every man or woman who follows 
Christ is sure to be called that, soon or late. 
I have heard people called "fools" for not dar- 



98 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ing to take a drink, or for holding themselves 
to chastity of life, or for declining to pick up 
a gauntlet flung at their feet. Pools? Per- 
haps. But it appears, on many wonderful 
pages of history, that "God hath chosen the 
foolish things of the world to confound the wise; 
. . . and . . . the weak things of the world 
to confound the things which are mighty." 
Better be a "fool" for God, if need be, and see 
the walls of some Jericho fall. 

One look more at Joshua. He had come to 
the end of the lane. And he lifted his hands 
in warning and benediction. He made his 
people take an oath of allegiance. He knew 
that a blessing is not a blessing unless it is 
reverently used. So you see him with lifted 
hands, calling upon his people to choose: "If 
it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose 
you this day whom ye will serve; . . . but as 
for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." 



VIII 
ON BEHALF OF GOD— SAMUEL 

No other process in the world is so interesting 
as the process of making a life. Not the man- 
ufacture of glass, for example, though I have 
watched it spellbound; not the production of 
a modern newspaper, fascinating as that is; 
not the building of an automobile with its 
almost human nicety of adjustment — not these, 
but the making of a life. One of our famous 
soup-making concerns, whose output has saved 
the kitchen labors and the reputation for hos- 
pitality of many a housewife, invites the read- 
ers of its street-car "ads" to visit the factory, 
and see for themselves the cleanliness and 
marvel of the process. But when all's said 
and done, manufacture is never so wonderful 
as life is: and no other process in the world 
is so compellingly interesting — or a tithe so 
important — as the process of making a life. 

Moreover, you can watch it anywhere, any 
time. If you want to see guns made, or tapes- 

99 



100 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

tries, or paper, you must go on pilgrimage to 
the proper establishment. But if you want 
to see lives made, all you need to do is to step 
into the street, or drop in at a schoolroom, or 
an office, or a saloon, or a slum, or a jail. Nay, 
all you need to do is to stay at home, and mark 
the process that is going on in the soul of your 
child, or the soul of yourself. Everywhere 
that life is lived, life is being made. All the 
winds that blow upon it, the warm suns that 
open it prematurely and the frosts that nip it 
cruelly; work and play, love and hate, joy and 
grief, hope and fear — all these, and what not 
besides, contribute their several parts to the 
process of making a life. Everything you read, 
everything you do, everything you yearn for, 
and everything you lose is represented in your 
life when your life is made. It will not make 
so much difference whether or not you have 
seen Europe, or the Grand Canyon, or even 
Mammoth Cave, if you succeed in seeing how 
life is made. 

But I want to study the process with you in 
one of the great figures of the Bible — Samuel. 
And if I say less about Samuel the finished 
product than about Samuel in the making, it 
will be because we are interested, just now, 



SAMUEL 101 

in the process of making a life. Look! In a 
profound sense Samuel was "made" before he 
was born. He had that incalculably rich 
asset, a good mother. I mean that he had a 
good woman for mother, which is saying far 
more than that the woman who bore him 
mothered him well. I do not know that a 
lioness need be a "good" lioness in order to be 
a good mother to her whelps. But a woman 
needs to be the best kind of woman before she 
can be the best kind of mother to her laddie. 
Or, if I speak of the other sex — for there are 
fewer good fathers than good mothers — then 
listen to this. For me there is a racking 
pathos in the eagerness of some fathers to make 
their sons register an improvement upon the 
fathers: bibulous fathers insisting that their 
boys shall not drink; incontinent men trying 
to hold their boys to chastity of life; dis- 
honest fathers craving honest boys. Thank 
God for a belated solicitude, even! But it is 
so tardy. It is so tragically and criminally 
tardy. The time to begin to make the life 
of the boy who may bear your name, or the 
lassie who may some day call you "Daddy," 
is in your own young manhood. 

Nay, further back still. One recalls the 



102 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

quizzical advice given by Henry Ward Beecher: 
"Choose a good grandparent to be sprung 
from." Unfortunately, we did not have the 
choosing of our grandparents; but we may 
choose the sort of grandparents we will be. How 
vividly I recall one of my grand-dads. He 
was so hearty and bluff. And I can still see 
his eyes shine into mine. But I can also remem- 
ber how, even then, people used to apologize 
for him; for his terrible temper, his ungovern- 
able moods, his disobedience to God. And I 
wonder now if he realized what it meant that I 
was one quarter his; and that my battle must 
be harder fought as a result of the life he lived. 
O the responsibilities of parenthood, "unto the 
third and fourth generations"! You know 
how often we must go back a couple of gener- 
ations to explain the color of a child's eye 
or the hitch in his gait. Biology is very ex- 
plicit on this point. Certain physical peculiar- 
ities are quite likely to skip the second gener- 
ation, only to reappear in the third. And the 
tendency is not diminished when the twist is 
moral. Life reaches over the heads of the 
intervening generation, often, to lay its deep- 
set mark upon the soul of a grandchild. What 
a world to live in — where we hand ourselves 



SAMUEL 103 

down for better or worse, in a sort of bridal 
with the ages! 

One fault I find with the sowing of wild oats 
is that they are usually sowed at the wrong 
age. The best age to practice that dismal 
sort of agriculture is, say, between sixty and 
eighty. The field in which old folks sow is 
relatively small — like a door-yard — whereas 
the field in which younger people sow is the 
world. Let no one talk to me about his willing- 
ness to garner his own harvest. As matter of 
fact, he will not be willing when harvest time 
comes. And as matter of further fact, he 
cannot do it. His children and grandchildren 
— not to say his brothers and sisters and friends 
— will gather part of his harvest. O, yes, I 
know what some people say. I know what 
some of you say — and it is time to stop saying 
it. (For one thing, it gives you away.) You 
say that "boys will be boys." True, but boys 
are also the sons of God; and there is no reason 
in heaven, none in noble parenthood, none in 
the nature of the case, why a son of God should 
go to the devil for a few years before he strikes 
the trail that leads home. So to live that your 
grandchildren are proud of you; so to order 
your life that you make self-control easier for 



104 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

posterity; so to use your best gifts as to be- 
queath them enhanced to later "pilgrims of the 
Infinite" — this is my first lesson from Samuel. 
Hannah, the mother, helped him make his life 
before he was born. 

Notice now a second part of the process. She 
brought him to the temple. She dedicated 
her best to the "Highest." That is a beauti- 
ful dialogue between Hannah and her husband. 
'Twas the season of the yearly sacrifice, and 
ordinarily, Hannah would have jumped at the 
chance to go. She was the sort of woman who, 
in our day, would be found at church, or about 
some Christly ministry, instead of ranging the 
countryside, at thirty-five miles per hour, 
at the season of public worship. In short, she 
was the kind of woman I should like my mother 
to be — the kind my mother was. But the 
Record says that "Hannah went not up [to the 
temple]; for she said ... I will not go until 
the child be weaned, and then I will bring him, 
that he may appear before the Lord, and there 
abide forever." She dedicated her best to the 
Highest, according to her light. 

Has it occurred to you that our best is never 
really our best until it is dedicated to the 
Highest? This is the fault I find with so many 



SAMUEL 105 

of our gifts: they have never been dedicated 
to the Highest. One day a friend chanced 
upon Jenny Lind, seated outdoors, facing the 
westering sun, with an open Bible upon her 
lap. Talk fell upon the great singer's stage 
career and why she gave it up. "Because," 
said the singer, at length, and very soberly, 
"the longer I remained on the stage, the less 
I thought of this" pointing to the Bible, "and 
nothing at all of that," reaching her hand 
toward the sunset, as if she would take in the 
eternities. Even a voice must be dedicated — 
to the Highest; not to salary, or to fame, or to 
anything lower than the Highest. Sometimes 
I think this is what you miss in an otherwise 
pleasing voice. You miss the dedication. It 
has never yet been dedicated to the Highest. 
And as with a voice, so with any other 
endowment. It is not enough to play with it, 
as a child might play with a diadem. Neither 
is it enough to trade upon it, as men traffic in 
wheat and iron. You need to crown with it. 
You must dedicate it to the Highest. Always, 
hard by your best gift, you will find an altar — 
always. It is for the dedication of your gift 
to the Highest. 
No life asset is really an asset, it is only 



106 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

a liability, until it has been consecrated. 'Tis 
the unconsecrated money works the havoc 
in the world. There is never any need to limit 
dedicated fortunes. Dedicated money will do 
so many beautiful things that the man who 
sweeps out your office will be glad you are rich. 
Nor is the millionaire the only son of God 
who must build an altar by his pile. The 
week's wage, the little hoard in the savings 
bank, needs dedicating to the Highest. And 
so with human love. Somebody says: "No 
love is pure that is not passionate." 'Tis 
not impassioned love which strews our world 
with wrecks. It is unconsecrated love; love 
lacking reverence, love that has no altar. 
And so with power. Power dedicated to the 
Highest is as safe as the Rock of Ages, and as 
holy as a mother's kiss. This hideous war 
is the work of unconsecrated power. Our 
newspapers have printed for us the prayers 
of Kaisers and Commanders, invoking God's 
blessing upon their arms. But what mockery 
is prayer for blessing upon unconsecrated might ! 
As well pray for water to run uphill, and this- 
tles to bear roses. 

But the dedication I am particularly con- 
cerned with is the dedication of life itself. 



SAMUEL 107 

Hannah's best gift was her boy. And she 
dedicated her boy to the Highest. One of 
my seminary professors used to tell of the day 
on which my father and mother laid their eldest 
born in his arms for Christian baptism. I 
do not think it surprised him for me to enter 
the ministry. He seemed to feel that I had been 
set apart for it long before my feet found their 
use. At any rate, I had been dedicated to God 
by the woman who bore me and the stalwart man 
at her side. And they laid me in Dr. Upham's 
arms as confession that I belonged to God. 

This is the significance of the sacrament of 
baptism. It is not a mysterious preparation 
of the soul to meet God. It is not a prophy- 
laxis against the terrors of perdition. It is a 
plain, wholesome dedication of a child to the 
Highest. I have been sent for, many times, 
to baptize a dying child. And I was admon- 
ished to hurry, lest I arrive too late. Too late 
for what? Too late to trust God to receive 
the unsoiled soul of a child? Pardon me if 
I say that the baptism of a dying child seems 
little removed from heathen superstition. 
There is no more need to baptize a dying child 
than to show a homing pigeon the way home. 
Baptism is the dedication of a living child; a 



108 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

child that is likely to live, and be teased by 
siren voices, and swept by gusts of sorrow, 
and crushed by the burdens of his day. It is 
his consecration to the Highest, that he may 
never lose the trail. 

But back to the story. Samuel's mother 
could not make his life for him. I heard Dr. 
McCuaig say recently that with proper inheri- 
tance and home culture no boy or girl would 
go astray. For a moment I should have liked 
to believe him. But I do not so believe. And 
upon sober reflection, I do not wish so to be- 
lieve. If fathers and mothers could guarantee 
the future integrity of their children, then there 
would be as little merit in integrity as in the 
painting on a porcelain vase or the texture of 
a butterfly's wings. Goodness is not a hand- 
down; it is an election. The utmost that par- 
ents can do is to prepare their child for the 
journey. He must stand at the crossroads 
and personally choose the path he will take. 
In one of the galleries of Europe is an unfin- 
ished statue. Only the rough outline is there. 
You may guess what the sculptor intended, 
but you may guess only. If the work is ever 
completed, it will be by other hands than his. 
Within the limits set by his incomplete chisel- 



SAMUEL 109 

ing, they may fashion it as they will. So we 
take ourselves from the hands of our parents — 
unfinished; prophetic but incomplete. We 
must make our own lives. Of course, we can 
never make of them what we might have made, 
for better or for worse, if they had left them 
untouched. We must take ourselves as we find 
ourselves. Then we make ourselves what we 
will. Nobody but ourselves is responsible for 
the detail of the finished product — whether for 
praise or for blame. 

So you see Samuel, the lad, in his temple 
lodgings, stirred for the first time by the very 
voice of God. I need not retell the story in 
detail. God called; and Samuel, not being a 
prodigy but a normal lad, thought it was Eli 
speaking, and ran to the other's bed. Ordi- 
narily it would have been Eli calling. Most 
of us get our divine calls through some Eli. 
Earth would be an uncanny, unwholesome 
place if we must be forever lying awake waiting 
for God to speak mysteriously in our souls. 
God intrusts most of his messages to human 
mouthpieces. You do not need any diviner 
word of command or restraint than you have 
had already from the lips of your mother or 
your friend or your child. The trouble with 



110 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

most of us is that we do not want to admit that 
God is speaking. Joan of Arc got her call 
from the sky; but if you ever get one, you will 
probably find it in the eyes of the man you have 
wronged, or the tragedies of the poor, or the 
foul breath of the open saloon. As a man said 
to me once, "I know my duty perfectly well, 
but I do not want to do it." Exactly. And 
no celestial voice, disturbing you at night, can 
make your duty more profoundly yours. Sam- 
uels are rare. In fact, Samuel's entire life is 
an example of what I have just been saying: 
He spoke for God. 

But of that a moment later. Meantime this: 
that the prime business of life is to be obedient 
to the highest voice you have heard. One of 
the cleverest "ads" ever conceived is that of 
a fox terrier, cocking his head to one side 
at the sound of "his master's voice," in the 
phonograph. As some one said: "It takes 
a good machine to fool a dog." But to tell 
the deeper truth, the dog is not "fooled" at all. 
It is his master's voice that he hears through 
the horn of the machine. It is the voice that 
he answers, though the master be nowhere in 
sight. And so far the advantage is with the 
dog, for we humans explain away our Master's 



SAMUEL 111 

voice when we can. We ask continually fresh 
certifications that the voice is our Master's, 
when what we need is not fresh proof but 
prompt obedience; to say, as Samuel did, 
"Speak, Lord, for thy servant is listening." 

So Samuel's life was made. And when it 
was made, he became a voice for God. There 
is not time or need to detail the story. For it 
resolves itself into this: that the lad who 
heard the Highest Voice, and obeyed, became 
a voice of the Highest. As the purifier of his 
people's worship, as the king-maker and the 
inquisitor of kings; as the humbler of ancient 
enemies and the counselor of the confused, he 
was always a voice. That is the meaning of 
prophecy: it is not a foretelling of events, 
it is a forthspeaking for God. Can you think 
of another honor so significant as that — to 
speak for God? Fancy being content with 
earning wages and having a good time when 
we might be spokesmen for the Most High! 
0, the ignominy of being an echo of other peo- 
ple's opinions when we might be a voice for 
God! Have you spoken a clear word for him 
lately? A word against sin in low places or 
high? A word of comfort to the broken and 
of guidance to the lost? 



112 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

The last glimpse we catch of Samuel is a 
strange one. We catch it through the steam 
of a witch's brew. Saul was at his wit's end, 
and he called for the man who anointed him 
king, years before. "Bring me up Samuel," 
he cried to the witch. And, according to the 
Record, the form that rose before his tormented 
soul was the form of the prophet. And the 
voice was still the voice of God. 



IX 

AFTER GOD'S OWN HEART— DAVID 

David, "the man after God's own heart." 
Frankly, there are many people who would 
prefer the description omitted. That is to 
say, they know better what to make of David 
without the label. The label confuses if it 
does not affront. Again and again, I have heard 
it flung as a taunt against David's God, that a 
man of such flagrant faults should be picked 
as a "man after God's own heart." I can 
understand. Among the piano selections most 
popular in my boyhood days was one the title 
of which always exasperated me. For obvious 
reasons I refrain from naming the selection: 
it may have been a favorite of yours. And, 
for that matter, it was a favorite with me. 
When I had my choice of the instrumental music 
I should listen to, I nearly always asked for 
that particular number. But the title seemed 
peculiarly infelicitous. I could not see why 
anybody ever gave it to that composition. I 
never could make it fit. It described the piece 

113 



114 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

as poorly as the titles of some books I have 
read hinted their contents. And I ended by 
positively disliking the piece itself. 

So with David, the man of many "moods 
and tenses." You would find it difficult not to 
like him. He has so many sides that you can 
always find one to your taste. No such versa- 
tility can be found anywhere else in the Bible, 
or perhaps outside. Michael Angelo was sculp- 
tor and painter, architect and litterateur, all 
in one. Rossetti was equally at home in poetry 
and art, in music and in the salon. But no 
other man I ever heard of touched life at so 
many points, flung back the fight from so many 
facets as David did. Look again. He was 
Israel's sweetest singer, her most brilliant war- 
rior, her best-loved king. His name is a 
synonym for fidelity in friendship, for chivalry 
of conduct, for passionate love. You see him, 
now a shepherd, and again with his hands on 
a harp, challenging a giant to mortal combat, 
and seeking out the crippled grandson of his 
arch foe for special tenderness. Sometimes 
you catch him strong, sometimes tragically 
weak, sometimes altogether admirable, and 
anon quite detestable — but always interesting. 
Even in his fall there is splendor clinging to 



DAVID 115 

him, as to the ruins of Melrose Abbey or the 
broken statue of the Venus de Milo. 

Alas, then, for the title given in compliment: 
"David, the man after God's own heart." 
Fortunate if, in protest against the title, we do 
not end by disliking the man. What is there 
to say? Well, for my part, there is no need to 
say anything. The last service God needs 
from you or me is vindication of his character 
or justification of his ways with men. God 
needs defending about as much as the Alps do. 
I may not admire them. I may decide that 
they ought to have been reared somewhere 
else on the globe. Or I may rest my soul 
against their massive shoulders. In any event 
I shall never be called upon to defend them. 
Tall, firm, bulwarked and snow-clad, they will 
accept my compliments or curses, and still 
be there, next morning. God needs defending 
as little as sunlight does, when it ripens the 
grape on the vine or rots it on the ground; 
as little as the ocean does when it bears a 
world's commerce on its broad bosom or swal- 
lows a torpedoed ship. The most elaborate de- 
fenses of God I ever heard left me unchanged 
in my opinion of him, and altogether ashamed 
of the defender. Years ago I stopped building 



116 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

theodicies. I do not pretend to understand 
pain, or death, or the persistence of sin. If 
you ever call me to you, in your sorrow, make 
sure that whatever else I try to do, I shall not 
put God in the witness-box against himself. 
The more Job's friends say, the less they con- 
vince him, and the worse case they make out 
for his God. 

"God is his own interpreter, 
And he will make it plain." 

So when the Bible describes one man as 
"a man after God's own heart," I let the 
statement stand. I suppose that God has as 
clear right to pick his special friends as I have 
to select mine. And probably as good judg- 
ment. God knew David better than I do 
even after I have read all the records about 
him. The longer I live the more reticent I 
become of advice to God. In my childhood 
days I could easily have told him how to run 
the weather, with particular reference to holi- 
days and skating. As a collegian I found 
myself possessed of a vast store of wisdom 
which I should have been glad to share with 
God. And even after I became a minister I 
saw many apparent miscalculations and over- 
sights of God. What would happen to the 



DAVID 117 

world if we did not advise God in our prayers? 
Nowadays I feel disposed to the conviction 
that God knows his own business. And when 
he describes David as a "man after his own 
heart" I leave the matter there. 

Moreover, I do not understand the descrip- 
tion to mean that God approved of all David 
did. What do you mean when you describe 
a boy as a boy after your own heart? You 
do not thereby offer him for canonization. 
You do not mean that he will grow up without 
needing to be whipped, nor that he will leave 
your heart unwrung. What you mean is that 
the best in him answers to the best in you, and 
that, within the uncouthness of his boyhood, 
you descry the making of a man. One of the 
dearest friends I ever had has made me ashamed 
of him time and again. Indeed, I have been 
told I ought to cast him off and out. Perhaps. 
But I do not see it so. For in that friend of 
mine are qualities so altogether regal, splendors 
of soul so far outshining the nice decorums of 
his critics that I do not hesitate to call him a 
friend after my own heart. Not long ago I 
had opportunity to ask a long-time resident 
of the national capital to name the best-loved 
President of the past fifty years. For an 



118 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

instant he hesitated; and when he answered, 
he did not name Grant the popular hero, or 
Cleveland the incorruptible, or Roosevelt the 
vehement and versatile, or Taft the gracious, 
or Wilson the scholar. He named a quiet, 
uncomplaining man, with deep-set, luminous 
eyes, whose life went out with a prayer of for- 
giveness for his murderer. Quarrel with the 
selection all you may, you will probably admit 
that it fits the fact. McKinley was the "man 
after the heart" of more Americans than any 
other President since Lincoln. That is all 
I am saying. And it is all the Record says 
about David. Somehow he was beautifully 
close to the heart of God. And I believe that, 
if you look into the matter, you will not wish 
to change the phrasing: "David, the man 
after God's own heart." 

For one thing David never grew up. The 
garment of the shepherd lad still suited the 
shepherd king. To the end of the story he 
kept the soul of a child. See him clamoring 
for a drink from the old well by the gate of his 
native town; or dancing furiously before the 
Lord, to the great horror of Michal; or taking 
the shewbread from the altar (a most impious 
proceeding) just because he was hungry; or 



DAVID 119 

sobbing his way up the steps when Absalom died 
— like a broken-hearted laddie. Always the 
child. David grew wise, accomplished, regal, 
commanding, but he never had the misfortune 
to grow sophisticated. Touch him anywhere, 
and you evoke the note of childlikeness. Even 
his sins were the sins of a child — and you can 
forgive a child anything. 

Somebody says that the topmost tragedy of 
life is the death of a child. No, it isn't; the 
topmost tragedy of life is the death of the child 
in the man or woman. Here are our boys and 
girls eager to grow to be men and women. 
And here are we, who have grown up, confess- 
ing the peril of growing up, lest the child-spirit 
die in the process. Nothing of achievement 
ever compensates for the loss of that. Nothing 
you will ever learn, nothing you will ever 
acquire, nothing you will ever become, can 
make you lovable in the absence of that. It 
is the boy in the man — the boy peeking out 
through the armor of the man, grinning at you, 
laughing for joy of being alive — 'tis the boy 
wins your heart. It is the girl in the woman, 
elusive or frank, winsome without trying to be, 
blushing at the gift of her love — 'tis the girl 
in the woman makes you captive, holds you 



no SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

captive a year and a day. As a matter of fact, 
you never fall in love with a grown man or 
woman, either for partner or friend. You put 
up with them. You reason out an affection 
for them, because of their virtues, or their 
bank accounts, or their usefulness to you. You 
may go so far as to adopt one of them as inti- 
mate or husband or wife. But never do you 
really fallen love with them — any more than 
you do with a sidewalk, or a railroad track, 
or a windlass. You cannot. 

"Give me the man who sings at his task," 
said Carlyle. Yes, give him to me. Give him 
to me for playmate and workmate, and for my 
gloomy hours. 'Tis the boy who doesn't know 
any better than to sing at his task — and God 
forgive you if you ever teach him to stop! 
Give him to me, for my heart's sake. Give 
him to you, to help you save your soul alive. 
God give you a husband who comes down- 
stairs whistling, and loves a practical joke as a 
boy does. God give you a wife who is more 
of a girl than any of her daughters. God give 
you a friend who is incorrigibly a child at forty 
or eighty. There is nothing beautiful about 
old age — with the child spirit dead. It may 
be pitiable, appealing, pathetic, but not lovely. 



DAVID 121 

By contrast take Oliver Wendell Holmes, still 
bubbling over with hopefulness and fun and 
enthusiasm at four score: still a boy. To 
grow old like that is no calamity; it is bene- 
diction. I recall that, occasionally, during my 
ministry, people have called me "boy," and 
wondered if I would ever grow up. The com- 
ment used to send me to the confessional for 
forgiveness. Now it makes me glad. I wish 
I could deserve to hear it all the time. Who 
wants a "grown-up" preacher, with the bloom 
rubbed off everything he sees? Jesus set a 
little child in the midst, and said, "Be like 
that." No wonder God loved David: David 
never grew up. 

But notice another characteristic of David — 
his magnanimity. To make use of an old- 
fashioned phrase, there was "not a mean bone 
in his body." He did some dreadful things; 
he showed some raw moods. You never 
could be quite sure what sort of music the wind 
of the moment would call out from his seolian 
nature. But he never was small. Even in 
his sins there was somewhat big about him. 
And in his best moods he was colossally big- 
souled. See him sparing Saul when every low 
motive cried for vengeance. Hear him pardon 



122 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Shimei for a quite unpardonable offense. Note 
his championship of the maltreated Gideon- 
ites. Taste, again, the exquisite sweetness 
of his lament over his friend: "O Jonathan 
. . . thy love to me was wonderful, passing 
the love of women." No man with a little 
soul could have written the Twenty-third 
Psalm. Then see him, defying the heathenish 
mourning traditions of his day, come out of the 
death chamber of his baby, with his face 
washed clean of tears, and a psalm breaking 
out of his soul: "While the child was yet alive, 
I fasted and wept: . . . but now he is dead, 
wherefore should I fast? ... I shall go to 
him, but he shall not return to me." O, great 
hearted singer, no wonder God called thee a 
"man after his own heart"! 

Swift, sudden sins are not the hardest things 
for God to put up with. Rather, the sin of 
littleness, of being priggish, of Pharisaism. 
Honestly, some men are more tolerable in their 
gusty wildness than others are in their four- 
by-seven proprieties. Sings Browning, in his 
"The Statue and the Bust": 

"The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say." 



DAVID 123 

And if that seem dangerous doctrine, reread 
a few of the things Jesus said to the precise, 
meticulous churchmen of his day. God can 
forgive the wild upheavings of a big soul far 
more easily than he can forgive a petty soul 
for being petty. And so, for that matter, can 
we. We do it every day. 

O to be big of soul! By all means, and at 
any cost, to be magnanimous! Too large 
for small jealousies and small revenges. Too 
large for the criticism which carps but never 
cures. Too large for suspicion and distrust. 
Too large to take advantage of your friend 
when his back is turned, or your enemy when 
he is down. Every virtue that makes men 
worth remembering: every influence that flings 
itself out across the roadway — like scent of 
lilacs — springs from the soil of a great heart. 
Name them over: the Lees and the Lincolns; 
the Beechers and the Brookses; the Wesleys 
and the Wickliffes; the Gladstones and the 
Garibaldis; Jesus and John. The list holds 
every immortal, and not a petty, bookkeeping 
soul among them. 'Tis an illustrious company 
to join: and the ranks are as wide open as the 
gates of the New Jerusalem. Nobody black- 
balled except for the high crime of being small ! 



124 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Do you know how to "speak a word in season 
to him that is weary"? When you love, do 
you let yourself go? Can you forgive like a 
prince? These are symptoms of the big heart. 
They suggest the man "after God's own heart." 

But I must hasten. David had a haunting, 
sanctifying sense of God. You know how, 
sometimes, you become suddenly and quite 
inexplicably aware of the presence of another 
in the room. Not a word has been spoken; 
not a motion has been made. But, by a sort 
of sixth sense, you realize that you are not 
alone. And you lift your eyes to smile into 
the face of mother or lover or friend. David 
had a somewhat similar sense of God. He felt 
God. Moreover, he loved everything that re- 
minded him of God, as you love the book your 
mother handled or the trinket she wore. Re- 
call his boisterous joy when the ark came safe 
home. Hear him tenderly complaining against 
the swallows who might lay their young where 
his heart cried to be: "even thine altars, O 
Lord of hosts." And then remember that his 
dearest wish, his final preparation, was to build 
a temple on Zion. 

Sensitiveness to God — there is no other apti- 
tude so significant, or so precious in results. 



DAVID 125 

Beethoven was so sensitive to harmony that 
the air seemed to be full of music. Turner 
was so sensitive to color that he made use of 
shades never before put on canvas. General 
Booth was so sensitive to the miseries of the 
poor that he founded the Salvation Army to 
quiet the pain in his own soul. Helen Keller 
is so sensitive of touch she says she can tell, 
in an instant, by the feel of a stranger's hand, 
whether the owner is coarse or fine, brute or 
angel. But to be sensitive toward God: to 
feel him push you back from evil, and know 
that it is he; to recognize the whisper of the 
"still, small voice" as readily as the crash of 
earthquake or rush of whirlwind — this is a 
finer gift still. And more of us possess it than 
admit possession of it. You would not want 
anybody to know how often you have said 
"No" to God. You do not like to remember 
the times you left him standing at the door of 
the heart. I was challenged, recently, for say- 
ing that some of the most religious men I ever 
knew had small use for the church. But I 
stick to my statement. And then I remind 
you what a tragic thing it is to have an aptitude 
for God and not encourage it; to know the 
sound of his voice and not obey it. 



126 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Just one mark more of the "man after God's 
own heart." David was quick to ask for- 
giveness. Just as soon as he saw himself in 
Nathan's parable, he cried, "I have sinned." 
You can forgive almost anything to the man 
who admits that he has done wrong. But 
these folks who brazen it out, and give their 
heads an extra toss in the air, and act so injured 
when the prophet overtakes them — it is not 
easy for us to forgive them. And it must be 
fairly difficult for God. David was different. 
Like a child his face fell, and his voice choked, 
and his knees went weak, and he flung himself 
into God's arms. You can't deny forgiveness 
to one who asks like that. Nor can God. He 
doesn't try. He tells Nathan to say, "The 
Lord hath put away thy sin." And of the for- 
given man he still says, "a man after mine own 
heart." 



X 



FULFILLING A FATHER'S DREAM- 
SOLOMON 

Ordinarily, nothing is truer than an axiom. 
When we have said, as our geometries taught 
us, that a straight line is the shortest distance 
between any two given points, or that things 
equal to the same thing are equal to each other, 
or that the whole is equal to the sum of its 
parts, we have told the truth, ordinarily. But 
not always. For in life I have seen every one 
of these axioms discredited. Take the last 
named axiom: "The whole is equal to the 
sum of its parts." Why, it is not true of apples 
even, as a certain wise lassie intimated. She 
was being inducted into the mysteries of vulgar 
fractions. She was shown an apple cut into 
sixteen parts. It was all quite plain — to the 
teacher. Sixteen sixteenths equal the whole 
apple, of course. But when the instructor, 
with that air of wise finality which instructors 
usually display, asked the child which she 
would rather have, sixteen sixteenths of an 

127 



128 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

apple, or the whole apple, the latter replied, 
"The whole apple, if you please." 

So would I. A whole apple is more than 
sixteen sixteenths of an apple. There is about 
a whole apple somewhat that the sum of its 
parts always lacks There is the aroma, for 
example, and the blush on one side, and the 
hall-mark of God. So a rose in bloom is more 
than the sum of its parts lying distributed and 
classified on a laboratory table, or named 
by the botanist. So the beauty of a face is 
more than the sum of its features and com- 
plexion and shape of eyes. So, a human life 
is more than the sum of its strengths and weak- 
nesses, its activities and its pains, its loves and 
its hates. You cannot add a man together, 
so to speak, and say how much of a man he is. 
You cannot analyze him into all his parts, and 
then affirm that he is the obvious sum of those 
parts. 

Just here is the common mistake. We take 
folks apart, as, every summer, I used to take 
apart my grandfather's clock. We tally all 
the wheels, and count the teeth on the cogs, 
and test the strength of the springs. And 
by the grace of God, we put them together 
again, as I put together the old clock in the 



SOLOMON 129 

attic. And we think we understand. But I 
tell you that an old clock in an attic, ticking 
out the minutes of its tinker, a clock going, 
is somehow more than the sum of its parts. 
And a man, even a very commonplace man, is 
mysteriously more than the sum of his moods 
and his motions. Tell me what he does for a 
living, how he treats his wife, the sort of books 
he reads, the use he makes of his idle hours. 
Show me the man among his friends, on his 
knees before his God, dreaming his daydreams. 
Tally every item one man can discover in an- 
other — nay, every mental registry a man can 
make concerning himself. So I know a great 
deal; sometimes a dismally uncomfortable 
deal, sometimes a joyously surprising deal 
about a man. But not the whole of him. Not 
even in his loftiest flights or most tragic degra- 
dations do I know the whole of him. Only God 
knows that. Only in the divine mathematics 
is a man equal to the sum of his parts — all the 
parts as God notes them. 

So, of course, with a conspicuous figure such 
as that of Solomon. It is entirely easy to pick 
out his excellencies and to pick on his blunders. 
No trouble at all to show where he may be an 
example to us, and where, on the other hand, 



130 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

we could point him the safe road. He is both 
big and small, wise and stupid, good and bad 
in one. He was a great king, but without rule 
over his own heart. He saw the stars, and the 
scum of things. He was the wisest man of his 
day — if one may trust the Record — but he lost 
the trail more than once. Here is the story, 
frank, unadorned. What do you make of it? 
For some reason I feel a strange reticence con- 
cerning Solomon — as if I were trying to appraise 
a man by his coat. He seems to elude me, as 
soul always does. I am sure he was more than 
the sum of his parts, as recorded. Doubtless 
he was bettei* — and worse; wiser — and more 
foolish; winged with broader pinioned faith, and 
sunk in deeper gloom of dismay. I wish I 
could show him to you as he showed himself to 
God. Whereas the utmost I can do is to give 
furtive glimpses of him. 

First, then, he took the place of a dead baby. 
No, I do not mean quite that. No other child 
ever takes the place of a dead child. Some 
years ago I stood in a home in which day and 
dark strangely battled. The casket and the 
crib were in adjoining rooms. The cry of the 
new-born and the last fluttering gasp of a little 
pilgrim of the Infinite mingled in the stillness 



SOLOMON 131 

of the place. And while I was praying by the 
still form of her dead baby, his mother was 
cuddling in her arms his new-born sister. Shall 
I say that the living child took the place of the 
dead one? Ask any mother. Nothing ever 
takes the place of a lost treasure. Nothing 
ever can. Once I lost a pocket-piece that I 
had carried for years. It would not have 
seemed valuable to anyone but me. It had 
gone with me through joy and pain. I had 
felt of it when my heart was full, and again 
when my heart was broken. It had worn 
smooth in service. And then I lost it. And 
ultimately another coin took its place. I mean 
that the new coin filled the same space in my 
pocket; it never took the place of the other. 
No new happiness ever takes the place of a dead 
happiness. Fill your heart to the brim, it will 
always ache with sense of loss for the happiness 
that died. No new friend ever takes the place 
of the dead friend. Always some part of you 
will be numb with parting. No new love ever 
takes the place of a dead love. It may be 
greater or less. But that is not the point. 
The point is that when love dies it leaves a 
grave in the heart. And you never can hide 
a grave — in the heart. 



132 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

So I can understand how it was with David 
and Bathsheba when Solomon was born. Nu- 
merically speaking, he filled the place of the child 
of their guilty love. But speaking in terms 
of the soul, that place would never be filled. 
All that Solomon could do was to fill his own 
place. Which is quite enough. God does 
not give a new joy to crowd out the memory 
of the old one. He gives a new joy to help us 
bear the memory of the old one. Indeed, I 
may say that God never lets an old joy die 
until he plants the seed of a new one in the 
garden of our hearts. A friend of mine had a 
strange conceit with respect to his garden. 
Every time a bush or shrub died he planted 
a new one. But never in the precise spot 
where the old one grew. He said he did not 
wish to hide his loss. He wanted to give his 
eyes beauty to feed upon. So God works in 
our lives. He does not want us to forget. He 
wants us to be able to live. Hence he sets a 
new bloom opposite the shriveled one. If you 
lose your fortune, he does not promise another 
fortune to replace the old. If you lose your 
health, he does not promise to give it back. 
If you lose your friend, he does not promise 
another one just as good. That were a narrow 



SOLOMON 133 

view of God which commits him to express his 
love in the same way, twice. But be sure 
that he leaves no life barren. He gives some- 
thing just as fine as that which he took away, 
often finer: riches of character for riches of 
purse; health of soul for health of body; friend- 
ship immortal for friendship passing. I do not 
think God meant David to forget the baby that 
died, and the sin of that baby's parentage. So 
he gave Solomon to David — to help David re- 
member. 

But hurry over the years, and see Solomon 
again, grown now and choosing for himself. 
Everybody knows the story: Solomon chose 
so wisely. He might have got himself remem- 
bered by a very different choice, as Aaron Burr 
did when he shut the door upon God; as Ben- 
edict Arnold did when he put money ahead 
of honor; as Charles the Ninth did when he 
gave orders for the massacre on Saint Barthol- 
omew's Day; as Judas did when he covenanted 
with the enemies of his Master. It is not 
difficult to get one's self remembered. A 
great sin will insure that as truly as a shining 
deed. The pith of the matter is that to every 
man, as to Solomon of old, comes the supreme 
moment of choice. As between the greater 



134 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

and lesser gifts of God, as between passing ad- 
vantage and permanent gain, as between the 
sometimes hard road that leads at last to the 
light, and the "great white way" which issues 
in darkness, every man and woman must choose. 
I realize, of course, that I am begging the 
question. The ground on which we stand 
for the moment is torn by the scuffling feet and 
spotted with the dark blood of an age-old 
controversy. The ancient issue between free 
will and fate has never been fought to a finish. 
Nor is it a philosopher's fight. Now and again, 
I hear the man in the street confess his convic- 
tion that everything is settled for us, and that 
we are merely the manikins of circumstance. 
Very well — if that creed suits you. Be a passive 
cog in the purposeful or purposeless machine 
which grinds out history as a grist mill turns 
out meal. As for me, I prefer to stand or fall 
with the doughty Dr. Johnson, who, when he 
had broken his last lance in the lists, said, de- 
fiantly, "Well, I know I am free, and there's 
an end on't." I assume that when you pass out 
of your door, you can elect to go north or south. 
I assume that when you are invited to take 
a drink you can say "No," if you want to. I 
assume that when the roads fork toward honor 



SOLOMON 135 

and dishonor you can choose either one. You 
are at liberty to think differently if you please, 
that is, providing you conclude you are free 
enough to think at all. I assume that every 
human not insane, or imbecile, or degenerate, 
or rotted by sin, has the power to choose 
the road he will take, and the company he will 
keep, in his soul. Otherwise I might as well 
preach to buttons in a button factory, or leaves 
on a stream. Nay, I might as well be a button 
in process of manufacture, or a leaf drifting out 
to sea. 

Solomon chose. At least he has always had 
the credit of it. And when he chose, he chose 
an "understanding heart." "An understand- 
ing heart" — that means so much more than 
a discriminating brain. Mind is a cold thing, as 
cold as steel. I can admire it from a distance, 
as I admire snow on the mountain or a statue 
in a gallery. But I do not want to lay my 
hands upon it as upon living flesh. Nor do I 
want it to touch me. I am always half afraid 
of the man who is "all brain," as they say; 
who sees without mercy, and argues flawlessly, 
and judges without love. Give me for my 
friend, for my prophet and priest and king, 
the man with an "understanding heart." I 



136 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

mean a man with a nature all warm, and an eye 
that overflows with sorrow when it lights upon 
my fault. 

According to a French proverb, "To under- 
stand all is to forgive all." I do not think 
the proverb is true. I do not think it ought 
to be true. Some things are harder to forgive 
after you understand. But, for a thousand uses 
in common life, the gift of an understanding 
heart would be the divinest gift we could crave. 
To see people kindly, to taste the brackish 
fogs of their doubt and feel the chill of their 
loneliness, to visit them on the pitiless fields 
where they fight for their souls — even though 
they lose in the end — this would be like Jesus. 
For Jesus had an "understanding heart." That 
is why none except simon-pure hypocrites and 
unrepentant devils were afraid of him. You 
are never afraid of the "understanding heart." 
It makes you look up. It gives you back faith 
in yourself. It shames your sins as a mother 
does. It sets your feet in the good road to 
which not all Pharisees could drag you. Jesus 
"knew what was in man," as the Record says, 
but he did not tell all he knew. He saw flaws 
as readily as does your "flaw-seeing eye," but 
he did not tell all that he saw. He felt swift 






SOLOMON 137 

heats of anger, and cold sweats of pain, but he 
seldom let himself go. He kept the "under- 
standing heart" till the end. And when the 
soldiers were rough with the gentlest Prisoner 
they had ever touched, he understood them 
better than they understood themselves; and 
out of that "understanding heart" leaped a 
prayer that has broken up the ice of countless 
myriads of natures: "Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do"! Solomon 
got what he asked — an understanding heart — 
and with it all the lesser gifts most men demand 
first: long life and riches and honor. I won- 
der if the greatest asset you could ask — next 
to a forgiven soul — whether for success in trade 
or in friendship or in redemption, could be 
greater than the asset of an "understanding 
heart." 

But I must hurry over the story. Solomon 
gave his name to the noblest temple ever built 
with hands. They say that when Titus, the 
Roman conqueror, long used to sight of famous 
shrines, caught glimpse of the fane on Moriah, 
he bowed his head in awe. Think of being 
remembered as the builder of a temple! Of 
the public works Solomon may have planned, 
of the roads and markets he built, of aqueducts 



138 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

and walls, no memory remains — only the asso- 
ciation of his name with a temple. What shall 
it profit a man if he shall build everything but 
a temple and fail to build that with his life? 
One day a friend of mine stood up before a 
group of prominent business men engaged in 
a big real-estate deal, and he said: "Gentle- 
men, I can't go with you; I prayed about it 
before I left home." And one blushed, and 
another hurried to the window, and a third 
told me with awed eyes. That was a temple 
downtown. It lifted a dome higher than the 
roof of the office building in which they sat. 
What are you at your utmost? Trader, teach- 
er, promoter, banker or temple-builder? How 
would you like best to be remembered: as the 
man who put through a big deal, or the engi- 
neer of a public improvement, or the architect 
of a fortune — or the builder of a place of 
incense and prayer where neighbors as well as 
yourself may find uplift and peace? Apropos 
of certain possible changes in a certain church 
building it was said a church architect ought 
to be employed. But every man is called to be 
a church architect in his life. He must build 
a temple, or fail of the supreme business of life. 
In business, in politics, in friendship, in love — 



SOLOMON 139 

always the temple crowning all, as the temple 
of Solomon gleamed down over the city of marts 
and homes. 

One word more. Solomon was a man of 
peace. His name means it. He consecrated 
himself to securing it for his kingdom. For 
forty years war was a forgotten art. With the 
main strength of a commanding personality, 
and with the fine art of a gracious hand, he held 
together, in semblance of unity, the north and 
the south of his land. It was a sort of Augustan 
age for his people. But he paid too much for 
peace, as I fear we Americans have been doing. 
And the peace he secured was not the peace of 
righteousness: it was the peace of compromise. 
Some one says that the many marriages which 
have made his apologists wince were con- 
tracted for reasons of state. In other words, 
he was not a sensualist; he was a diplomat. 
Similarly, you see him patronizing the high 
altars of heathen worship; a profoundly reli- 
gious man carrying water on both shoulders. 
That sort of peace never endures. It is never 
worth the price. And you see him, at the last, 
eating the bitter bread of disillusion, hands 
numb with strain of holding his kingdom 
together; soul crying out: "Vanity of vani- 



140 



SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 



ties, all is vanity." And his brilliant sun sank 
in a mass of menacing clouds whose threat of 
disaster was already distantly booming in his 
ears. Will you "hear the conclusion of the 
whole matter"? I bring his own closing words: 
"Fear God and keep his commandments, . . . 
for God shall bring every work unto judgment, 
. . . whether it be good or whether it be evil." 



XI 

DOWN BY THE BROOK— ELIJAH 

Every lover of a good story knows the men- 
tal pique of opening a volume at an exciting 
chapter. For the moment attention is riveted 
to the action portrayed or the emotions re- 
corded. Perchance it is a clash of arms, or 
of wits, or of duty with desire — and the spell of 
the thing holds you bound. But the names are 
strange, and the situation needs a setting. And 
so, instinctively, you turn back the pages to 
the beginning of the story, that you may ap- 
proach the particular scene with understand- 
ing. Not very different is one's mood when 
he opens the story of Elijah at the court of Ahab. 
'Tis a thrilling chapter. You can almost hear 
the hiss of the prophet's hot word as it fell 
upon the ear of the dissolute monarch. And 
you can easily visualize a long finger pointed at 
the head of a cruel woman. Moments like 
that burn themselves deep into history. But 
with your second breath comes a perfectly 
healthy human curiosity for other chapters, 

141 



142 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

earlier chapters. Elijah appears as a sudden 
squall does on a sultry afternoon. What wind 
brought him? What were his antecedents 
and connections? What sort of man was he 
before he broke, with revealing lightnings and 
crashing threats, upon the fetid air of Ahab's 
court? Nobody knows. We must begin the 
story here. Suffice that the prophet came, and 
delivered his word, and was gone almost before 
a recreant pair could make out his features. 

Need I pause to remind you how often life 
uses us thus? Life's greatest voices break in 
upon our usual days, without formal introduc- 
tion, or giving us the chance to change a collar. 
We do not see the supreme joy or sorrow com- 
ing; suddenly, tall and splendid, or black and 
menacing, it looms before us. The word 
which almost bursts a heart with happiness 
or strips it with pain slips in from the highway 
unannounced. Full well, of course, we know 
it must have a history. God is a God of 
order; and you might as soon expect him to 
set a flower blooming in midair, or to raise a 
tide without pull from the moon, as to drop into 
our souls an unrelated prophetic voice. But, 
so far as we are concerned, life's greatest visi- 
tations are as sudden and unexpected as the 



ELIJAH 143 

appearance of Elijah in Ahab's court. 'Tis 
a world of surprises, and never more surpris- 
ing than when the prophet comes. 

So be it; I do not personally object. At 
least, I do not so stoutly object to the factor of 
mystery in life as I do to the elimination of 
mystery from life. Hilda, in one of Haw- 
thorne's stories, enters a vigorous protest 
against the modern insistence upon having 
everything explained. For my part, I do not 
care to stay in a world in which everything 
has been explained. We are at the time of 
year when the perennial question comes up 
concerning banishing Santa Claus. Shall we 
explode the old romance of the chimney visitor 
and his wonderful pack? Shall we, in the in- 
terest of scientific truth, tell the little folks 
that "Santa" is dead; that he never lived? 
Or shall we leave them to find out for them- 
selves? Whichever we do let me enter this 
word. Christmas is never quite the same after 
Santa Claus goes. Even the stockings by the 
chimney are a sort of plaintive reminder that 
we hate to give up the old dream. Something 
always flies out the window when exact science 
comes in at the door. I do not want to hear 
mother love explained in terms of nerve reac- 



144 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

tions. I hate the modern stories which reduce 
to the lowest terms of matter the light that 
burns in a lover's eyes and the thrill of his 
woman's hand. I do not want to understand 
the whole secret of an acorn or a honeybee. 

"Great God ! I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

For me, you may leave the veils on a hundred 
mysteries. If I lift them, I shall hurry to drop 
them, for the sake of my soul; for the soul of 
a man cannot breathe in a mysteryless world. 
Better a touch of superstition than the blast- 
ing wind of materialism. If superstition drops 
into life an unhealthy awe, materialism brazens 
it with an unhealthy boldness — a sort of stark, 
know-it-all irreverence. By all means leave 
men and women the veils of mystery; the mys- 
tery of love, the mystery of pain, the mysteries 
of life and death. Let us accept some things 
for what they seem to be, palpitant with the, 
sense of God. 

And so with the prophet's word. I can 
imagine Ahab and Jezebel trying to explain 
away Elijah. Who was he, anyhow And 



ELIJAH 145 

what right had he to come? And why should 
they believe his message? I do not know just 
why they should; but I think there were more 
reasons for accenting it than for not accepting 
it. And the chief reason was the way the mes- 
sage stuck in their souls. You cannot gauge 
the value of a word from God by the livery 
of the prophet who utters it. God's messages 
to men have a fashion of taking possession 
and setting up housekeeping in the soul. Never 
mind how they come, whether in the face of a 
child or the plea of a friend, whether in the still- 
ness of night or the babel of day. My father 
got his call to preach, not from the hand- 
writing on the stars, but from the vibrant 
word of an old man. Lincoln got his challenge 
from sight of a slave on the auction-block. The 
Bishop of Uganda, once a successful artist with 
the brush, got from the faces of passers-by his 
commission to play artist to the soul. We 
have had prophetic words enough, all of us: 
warnings against evil, entreaties to be un- 
selfish, commands to follow Jesus Christ. I 
do not think of myself as bringing you some 
new prophetic word. Rather my business is 
to plead for obedience to the word already 
yours. 



146 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

But Elijah. See him again. And you may 
need to look twice, in order to be sure that the 
man is the same. From the court of Ahab 
to the brook near Jordan ! How little you know 
a man when you see him before the footlights, 
or leading an army, or writing his book. 0, no, 
I am not thinking of his possible hypocrisies; 
I am thinking of his childlike helplessness. 
The bigger the man, the more dependent he is, 
on the other side of his nature. Elijah before 
Ahab, unterrified prophet of the eternal God, 
might give the impression of uncanny strength. 
But Elijah fed by ravens, and ministered to 
by a starving woman out of her scanty store, 
shows you man in his need. Edison has spent 
a valuable part of his useful life perfecting the 
storage battery. But neither he nor anyone 
else has built a storage battery that does not 
need recharging. At intervals, more or less 
regular, every such contrivance must be brought 
back to the dynamo for renewal of its life. 
Just so it is with folks — the most strenuous, 
self-sufficient folks. They cannot always be 
spending: giving light or heat or power. 
They must be recharged. They must wait, 
passive in the presence of another life, or before 
God himself. 



ELIJAH 147 

Here is the ministry of the living book. In 
every such book there is more than paper and 
ink and words. There is life. Said Dante, 
once, " That book has made me lean for many 
days." In other words, he had been pouring 
his life into it. And we merely take out what 
he put in. Have you never sat down with a 
book, distempered, lonely, forlorn; and read 
yourself into a beautiful calm? That is the 
ministry of books. At their best, they are not 
for entertainment; they are set to recharge the 
soul. And if you have no books to do that for 
you, your library must be poorly chosen. 

So with the ministry of home. A home is 
different from a boarding-house, though a woman 
can make home of a back room in a lodging. 
Home is other and more than a place of beds 
and board. It is a power station. It supplies 
current for the lights on the highway of life, 
and energy for the looms of life's business. And 
always by a woman. Man cannot make a 
home. He never could. The most luxurious 
house ever built is only a house until a woman 
enters it. She charges it with a mysterious 
power from God. Sometimes as wife, some- 
times as mother, sometimes as daughter, she 
makes it a place of ministry. One day a 



148 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

priest, a warm personal friend, looked about 
our sitting room, and said with pent-up sadness, 
"My house is only a barracks, lacking a woman's 
hand." That was what he said: I wonder 
what more he thought No man really lives 
until he is blessed by a woman's ministry. 
Invade his sanctuary and you will find that the 
secret of his finest work, his most deathless 
courage is a woman. From her he gets his 
impetus; at her feet he lays his most hard- won 
crowns, though she may never know. 

And so with the church. It stands for the 
recharging of the soul. If a man can truth- 
fully say, with Henley: 

"I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul," 

then I, for one, cannot see any reason for him 
to attend church. The church is for spent souls; 
for men who have lost grip on their ideals, 
and women who are in peril of breaking faith 
with themselves. Every time the doors open 
out at close of worship, people walk with a 
sturdier step than brought them in. Was it 
the sermon, or the music, or the air of the 
place? Most likely it was Jesus Christ wrought 
the change. From the beginning it has been 
his mission to strengthen the bruised reed and to 



ELIJAH 149 

breathe on the smoking wick. Peter was a 
spent battery more than once; Jesus recharged 
him. Thomas had lost his light, Jesus set him 
glowing again. The Magdalen was cold with 
the ice of a world's scorn; Jesus started the 
warm, wonderful currents of contrition and 
self-respect. Paul, on the Damascus road, was 
a zealot burned out with his own ruthless fire; 
Jesus rekindled him to a new and holier ardor. 
If you go out of church just as weary and 
disheartened as when you came in, it will be 
because you have resisted the touch of the 
Hand that was pierced. 

So in a multitude of ways God redeems us. 
Sometimes by the breath from the heart of a 
flower; sometimes by the rebuking whiteness 
of the driven snow; sometimes by the trustful 
arms of a little child. And sometimes by less 
likely ministers. They were ravens which 
fed Elijah. Uncanny birds; they could not 
be offered on any Jewish altar. I suppose that 
Elijah grew up to despise them. But they were 
ravens which, without the remotest intention 
of providing sustenance for a hungry man, laid 
their own food so close to the brook that Elijah 
could help himself to it — to the accompaniment 
of their angry cries, no doubt. Blessed be 



150 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

God for any agents which help restore the 
soul! 

But my story must hasten, past certain 
familiar chapters, to the fire test at Carmel. 
I do not enjoy all the details of the picture; 
but I thoroughly like the hardihood of the man 
who was so sure of his truth that he was ready 
to see it tested. Years ago, I spent days out 
of a boy's life building a toy boat. With meas- 
ureless pains I fitted and rigged it. And as 
it stood on the mantel, full winged like a crea- 
ture ready for flight, I was proud with a build- 
er's pride. But I cannot recall that my boat 
ever touched water. Somehow I never was 
quite ready to trust it to its element. I was 
afraid it would sink, or capsize, or otherwise 
disappoint its builder. And it stood on the 
mantel until, one day, it sailed away into the 
limbo of a boy's outgrown toys. O, if toy 
boats were the only possessions we feared to 
test! How about faith? In one of my early 
parishes was a young woman who turned aside 
from Vassar just at the entrance door. She 
was prepared to enter. Her most intimate 
friend did enter. But she said she would not 
trust her faith to the cold air of the college. 
It was too beautiful, she said, and too fragile. 



ELIJAH 151 

And she would rather miss a college education 
than subject her Christian faith to such racking 
test. 

But what is faith for if not for test? How 
do you know the worth of your friend until 
you try him? How much of a man is he who 
cannot weather a storm? Gold shrinks not 
from any test. You may dissolve it with acid; 
you may melt it with fire; you may crush it 
with blows. But the scattered particles are 
still gold — finer for testing, and ready to be 
regathered into a wedding ring or the "coin of 
the realm." Elijah was sure of his gold — 
steadily sure, splendidly sure. I do not think 
that it occurred to him that he could lose it. 
And he was willing to see it tried by fire. If 
anything can save from the aspect of stark 
butchery this fearful war, it is the splendid read- 
iness of millions of men to die for their faith in 
their fatherland. Germany says she is right. 
England and France are sure that the God of 
battles is on their side. We of America doubt 
not the divine majesty of our cause, or the 
final issue. So with the other contestants. 
And they are draining their lands of men 
and of treasure in the most colossal fire- 
test of the ages. "So as by fire." O, for 



152 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

such splendid ruthlessness in the name of one's 
soul! To be so sure of God as to stake all upon 
the issue; to gather up the dreams and fears 
of life and submit them to the arbitrament of 
God — this is the very essence of faith. 

But the scene shifts again; and by one of 
those swift alternations of day and dark — of 
which life is full — we see Elijah under a juni- 
per tree begging to die. What do you make 
of it? Life. Elijah had won his greatest 
battle; yet there he is under the juniper tree. 
If he had staked and lost, you could under- 
stand. But he had won. And his dejection 
is the mood of the man whose ears have just 
been filled with shouts of triumph. Tell me, 
you who have won your crown, is there any 
other moment when you stand so in awe of 
yourself as when you first put on your crown? 
Nothing else depresses as success does; after 
the thrill has passed. To win the fortune for 
which you have been struggling, to set your 
feet on the summit toward which you have been 
climbing, to hear people say generous things 
about you — nothing else is so certain to drive 
a man to the juniper tree for a reckoning with 
himself. The loneliness of failure is not to be 
compared to the loneliness of success. One of 



ELIJAH 153 

our story-writers tells of a brilliant dhap who 
carried off the honors of graduation, and who, 
at the crucial moment, could not be found. 
And when his fellows found him, they found 
him in his room, under the bed, sobbing as if 
his heart would break. 

There is not time for me to recount all the 
beautiful ministries of God to a despondent 
Elijah. But at the climax God gave him a 
friend — Elisha. I think perhaps that was what 
Elijah had been needing all along — somebody 
to think with, somebody to dream over, some- 
body to be loved by. Said Benedict Arnold, 
when asked if he wanted anything in his exile, 
"Only a friend." Said Kingsley when asked 
to account for his rich life, "I had a friend." 
Says everybody who has entered into the 
beauty of it: 

"God never blessed me in so sweet a way before: 
'Tis he alone who can such blessings send: 
For when he would his fullest love declare, 

He brought thee to me, saying, 'Behold a friend/ " 

You never find Elijah under a juniper tree 
again; God had given him a friend. 

And the end of the story? I cannot make 
much of it, for you and me. Suddenly, as they 



154 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

two talked together, a strange chariot ap- 
peared, and Elijah had gone. And the friend 
whom God had given, stood for a moment star- 
ing into the vacant sky, and reverently gathered 
up the other's fallen mantle, and moved on to 
finish the other's task. 



xn 

THE UNDERSTUDY— ELISHA 

If you do not like imitators you will not like 
Elisha — not at first sight. He is a startling 
replica of his master, the most startlingly com- 
plete in the Bible. To say and do things as 
Elijah said and did them seems to have been 
his consistent aim. Did Elijah lash the waters 
of Jordan with his mantle? So did Elisha, 
using the other's outworn garment. Both were 
appealed to in season of drought. Elijah helped 
a widow in hunger; so did Elisha. Elijah gave 
back to a mother her dead boy; so did Elisha. 
Elijah became a foreign missionary in the dis- 
charge of his commission; so did Elisha. And 
the last words dropped into the ear of the ascend- 
ing Elijah were almost the last words heard on 
earth by the dying Elisha: "My father, my 
father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen 
thereof." The similarity, I say, is startling; 
and if you do not like imitators you will not 
like Elisha. 

But like him or not, you will probably admit 

155 



156 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

that most of us are examples of the same art. 
Imitation is not only the sincerest flattery; it 
is a law of life to the average man. There are 
few originals; nor can be. The moment a boy 
determines to be different from his father he 
probably becomes an unconscious copyist of 
his mother. In fact, the utmost that an or- 
dinary mortal can hope is to become as good 
or as strong, as wise or as Christly as his model. 
Many a time I have stood behind an art student 
copying some masterpiece in a gallery. Usu- 
ally the work was poorly done. And I won- 
dered how a Turner or a Corot would feel if he 
came back to earth long enough to inspect the 
copies of his masterpieces. It would be so 
much better for the young artist to get his own 
visions for the canvas. Doubtless. But so 
there would be few painters. Every artist, I 
suppose — except for a genius here and there — 
begins as a copyist. And only by straining his 
wings toward the empyrean of his master does 
he find full use of them for himself. 

At least it is so in life. Most of us make lame 
work of abstractions. We talk about truth 
and justice, love and the beauty of holiness — 
almost as if we were talking about concrete 
things, such as fountain pens and motor cycles 



ELISHA 157 

and ten-dollar gold pieces. But the fact is 
that only when we see some particular grace 
going on human feet, and hear it accented by a 
pair of human lips, do we know what we are 
talking about when we talk about it. No won- 
der Jesus declined to discuss "truth" with 
Pilate. He was truth. And if Pilate did not 
recognize truth when he saw it in the eyes of 
our Lord, an argument would be worse than 
wasted. If you have never seen justice in a 
man, you would not recognize it in a star. Un- 
less you know love when you behold it in a 
mother or a friend, God will probably never be 
able to give you any idea what love is. As 
for me, being an average man, and having a 
wretched mind for abstractions, I confess to 
having spent some of the most eager moments 
of my life, trying to be as kind or as patient 
or as just as some other pilgrim of the Infinite 
whose life had challenged mine. And a photo- 
graph on my mantel or in my heart; the vivid 
memory of the way some one I loved looked 
or spoke or acted has spurred my laggard steps. 
Grant, as I have sometimes affirmed, that the 
"imitation of Christ" is not the highest mark 
of a Christian life, it is the highest we shall 
probably reach. And if I could help you cross 



158 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the margin of the year, determined to do a few 
of the things that Jesus did, and as he did them, 
I should feel that by so much I had "advanced 
thee to be wise." 

So I do not reproach Elisha for being an 
imitator. Maybe he was not great enough 
to fill in the outlines of Emerson's descrip- 
tion: "Every great soul is an unique." Then 
he did well to adopt a model of heroic size and 
ministering hand. Enough for him that his 
master was great, and that he was like his master. 
Was it here you failed the past year? May I 
turn back the pages with you, just before the 
book is closed? Your trouble was not that 
you were an imitator, but that you imitated 
the wrong kind of people; or the wrong things 
in the right people. You copied styles rather 
than strength; manners instead of manhood. 
Your model was too small, or you reproduced 
its blemishes more than its beauties. You must 
still work from a model — not being a genius. 
Then be sure that the pattern is worth copying 
for the new year. Choose a master divine 
enough to evoke your best. We are "saved 
by our admirations." Whom do you admire 
most and follow most ardently? 

But Elisha. The longer I study him, the less 



ELISHA 159 

fault I find with him for being imitative. His 
was the imitation of the heart — and you rarely 
need to apologize for that. 'Tis the imitation 
of the head or hand that leaves men ashamed. 
Elisha was peculiarly a heart-man. The first 
glimpse we catch of him might be styled, as 
the famous painting was, "Breaking Home 
Ties." I like him all the better for his insistence 
upon that last kiss of his parents. I like any 
man better for the genuine glimpses he gives 
me of his heart. 'Tis heart, not head, which 
gives the divine measure of a man. 'Tis heart, 
not head, will redeem this world when redemp- 
tion comes. Earth's supreme debt is always 
to its great hearts, Erasmus had the head, 
Luther the heart — and Luther gave us the Re- 
formation. Lord North had the head, but 
John Bright had the heart — and Bright turned 
a new page for the poor of England. Emerson 
and Holmes had the head, but Whittier, Garri- 
son and Beecher had the heart. And out of the 
heart came freedom for the slave. Always, 
"out of the heart are the issues of fife" — and 
hope and liberty and love. 

Even in our bodies 'tis the heart supplies 
blood for the brain to think with. The mental 
machinery of a Shakespeare or a Webster 



160 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

stands as helpless as a stalled engine until the 
heart pumps power to it. Without heart, only 
a cold, staring eye, and an unresponding hand, 
and a hulk of flesh. And I believe the analogy 
holds. Heart is not everything, but it is back 
of everything worth doing, of every song worth 
singing, of every emancipation worth fighting 
for, of every redemption worth bringing in. 
Want of heart brought on the war. Heart will 
end it, and will yet sow with the seeds of a new 
brotherhood the blood-soaked fields of Europe. 
The victories of the coming day will be pre- 
eminently victories of the heart. When we 
have grown a great enough heart we shall put 
an end to sweatshops and the saloon. More 
love will work the industrial miracles for which 
we wait and yearn. Remind me that, in 
Scripture language, "the heart is deceitful 
above all things, and desperately wicked," and 
I shall only reply that the head is cold above 
all things and desperately cruel. And I shall 
continue to pin to the heart my hopes for the 
happiness of the individual and the race. 

Elisha was a man of heart. And his imita- 
tion of his master was the imitation which love 
prompts. Because he loved Elijah he wanted 
to be like Elijah. Remember the Elijah whom 



ELISHA 161 

the younger man knew was the tamed and 
sweetened Elijah. I am not sure that Elisha 
would have begged for a double portion of the 
spirit of the earlier Elijah. At any rate, Elisha 
gave his heart with his discipleship. And his 
imitation was the imitation of love. One of 
our modern novelists observes how a young 
man will clean up his life out of love for a good 
woman. But you do not need to go to the 
novelists to learn that. You can see it any- 
where — in your own life, perhaps. Indeed, 
I should say that when a man fails to clean 
up his life out of love for a woman, either he 
loves the wrong kind of woman or he loves 
meanly. Love is always imitative. That is 
part of its power — and its peril. You want to 
be like the one you love. Let a pupil love his 
teacher, and forthwith he begins to imitate 
him. Let a boy love his mother well enough, 
and you shall see the mother's attributes re- 
appearing in the son. Let a man love his 
friend, and unconsciously, perhaps, he takes 
on the likeness of the friend. Let one love 
Jesus Christ, and you have a new incarnation. 
The imitation of love. 

Ah, you need never be afraid of that. It is 
warm as a spring sun, and freshening as a sum- 



162 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

mer shower. It is the imitation of the head 
makes slaves and cads and Pharisees. 'Tis 
the imitation of the head that has filled the 
church with bigots and literalists. Men have 
seized upon some special word or way of Jesus, 
and have preached it with fire and fury. But 
when men fall in love with our Lord, and stay 
in love with him, their imitation of him will 
bless the world. "Followers of God, as dear 
children, 9 ' exhorts Paul. That is the nib of the 
matter. That is the only kind of "following" 
God invites. Not the soundness of our doc- 
trine, nor the punctiliousness of our conduct, 
but the allegiance of our hearts. "Followers 
. . . as dear children" — the imitation of love. 
But there is more to be learned from Elisha. 
His was the imitation of goodness. And we can 
stand a vast deal of that. Do you recall the 
tribute of a certain wealthy woman to Elisha? 
He had been up and down her street. And, one 
day, she said to her husband that the stranger 
who went up and down her street was a good 
man. I like that tribute better than any other 
ever paid to Elisha. To be known as a good 
man; to shed a fragrance as indefinable and 
yet as unmistakable as the fragrance of lilacs; 
to commend oneself not by elaborate protesta- 



ELISHA 163 

tions but by the sheer beauty of a pure life — 
what is finer than that? I still harbor the old- 
fashioned notion that Goodness is the most 
compelKngly arresting and attractive thing in 
the world. I cannot define it. But I know 
it when I see it, or when the breath of it blows 
in my face. And so do you. Men may quite 
easily work off upon you shoddy goods. Un- 
less you are preternaturally careful you may 
accept counterfeit money for the real thing. 
You may not know how to discriminate between 
an artificial pearl and the kind which some one 
describes as "the tear of the oyster." But 
your neighbors will need to get up early if they 
hope to fool you with simulated goodness. 
Goodness may take as many forms as fife does 
in your flower garden, but the essence is the 
same. And when we get past the poke-bonnet 
of the Shaker, and the robes of the priest; 
when we look deeper than the skin of a man, and 
hear what he says when he is not trying to say 
anything, we, all, are looking for the same 
thing. And when we find it our hearts cry to 
it as birds to their mates. 

I think we have paid too many compliments 
to the power of a bad man. I mean that we 
have not paid compliments enough to the 



164 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

power of a good man. The familiar instance 
of the bad apple in a barrel of good ones has 
been somewhat overworked. Partly because 
the analogy goes lame. The only way to save 
a barrel of good apples from falling victim to the 
decay of one bad apple is to remove the cor- 
rupting member. Nobody would think of 
putting a couple of sound apples into a barrel 
of bad ones, with a view of redeeming the bad 
ones. But life is different. And in life there 
is somewhat more important, even, than the 
elimination of bad men from the community: 
it is the introduction of good men into the com- 
munity. How else shall we save the world? 
"Father," prayed Jesus concerning the little 
company of his intimates, "I pray not that 
thou shouldest take them out of the world." 
And, then, with his latest breath, almost, he 
commissioned them to go into the world and 
make it more fit for the children of God. 

There's a pretty picture here of Elijah fling- 
ing his mantle across the shoulders of Elisha. 
I suppose you may consider it Elisha's call. 
But the real call was the call of Elijah's soul 
to the other. Goodness is the most daring 
challenger in the world. It drops its beautiful 
gauntlet at the feet of the most profligate man 



ELISHA 165 

in the neighborhood. Nay, it slaps with the 
bare hand of a forgotten ideal the face of a 
vagabond. Have you dared anybody, lately, 
to be as good as you are? Have you, in Pauline 
phrase, invited others to follow you as you 
follow Jesus Christ? Aren't you Christian 
enough to do it? Then, suppose you dare 
yourself to imitate the goodness of the best man 
or woman you know ? There are Elij ahs enough : 
people with faults, of course, but swept by 
great purposes, and refined in the furnace of 
pain; men whose integrity shows in their faces, 
and women whose asepsis of soul makes you 
ashamed of your sins. Will you play Elisha 
to some Elijah this coming year? At best will 
you sit so reverently before the Man who "went 
about doing good" that you begin to imitate 
His goodness? 

One further word. Elisha's imitation was 
the imitation of service. He saw his master 
spending himself upon others, and he conse- 
crated himself to a like ministry. If Elijah 
could bring plenty to a poverty-smitten home, 
why not Elisha? If Elijah could put back the 
joy-light into a broken-hearted mother's eyes, 
why not Elisha? 'Twas a pertinent question 
to ask. And I feel like recommending you to 



166 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

put to yourself a similar one. Patent office 
laws do not apply to acts of kindness, There is 
no copyright on a gracious word. You may use 
it five minutes after you hear it. 

Few things are more infectious than help- 
fulness is. All that the rest of us need is that 
somebody else should set the style. We are 
imitators by instinct. You know how compara- 
tively easy it is to raise money after you get 
a good subscription at the head of the list. 
One night I sat with a man from dinner till 
nearly midnight. I tried to make my cause 
his. At length he said with a smile of expan- 
sive benevolence, "I'll give you five hundred 
dollars." And I sighed, and shook my head, 
and lifted a prayer, and said: "No; I cannot 
use it. The next man I visit will look at your 
figure and also put down five hundred. Make 
if five thousand, and somebody will match it." 
And he sighed, and let go. And within forty- 
eight hours I had the second five thousand. 

That is the way we are built — most of us — 
except you who proudly testify that you do 
not imitate anybody else in your benevolence. 
(Alas, that neither do you stimulate anybody 
else to imitate you!) O, it is great to set the 
pace for other people in generosity and sacri- 



ELISHA 167 

fice. For most of us are good followers. You 
cannot keep us out of the band-wagon when once 
the procession moves. Whether for love of 
praise, or for the love of Christ, or for the love 
of love itself, we easily swing into line. We 
are almost as ready imitators as the Chinese 
are. Thank God! .If you cannot set the ex- 
ample, then follow it. If you cannot initiate, 
then imitate. The world is large enough for 
both classes. Play second fiddle well, if you 
are not competent to play first. The orchestra 
needs both. And I am not sure that the crown 
of Elisha is far inferior to that of Elijah. 

For your Pattern? Jesus Christ. It is great 
honor to wear his mantle. Everybody else is 
an imitator as compared with Jesus. None 
since has set the range so high. For the closing 
of the year, fix your eyes on him. See where 
he set his feet — 'twill be safe for you there. See 
the prints in his palms. Are yours unscarred? 
He taught the world a new pity. Do you 
practice it as a follower of him? 



XIII 

THE PREFERRED MAN— DANIEL 

Those old enough to do so will easily remem- 
ber the famous "fifteen puzzle." There were 
puzzles before, and there have been puzzles 
since, but none, perhaps, that had so wide a 
vogue. For the period of its popularity it 
was more in the speech of people than any 
political issue of the day. More people teased 
their brains and fingers over it than said their 
prayers ardently. And the man who worked 
it out carried his head high for the remainder 
of the day. My purpose in reminding you of 
it now, however, is merely for the sake of com- 
paring it with an older and more baffling puzzle 
— the book of Daniel, viewed as prophecy. 
You never know when you "get it right." 
And even when you are sure, your neighbors 
are not likely to admit that your answer is 
correct. With the "fifteen puzzle" you knew 
when you had finished; it was plain as a pike- 
staff. But with Daniel's mysterious weeks 
and kingdoms, his beasts and superman, the 

168 



DANIEL 169 

case is different. You never know when you 
have done. The most we are sure of, usually, 
is that the other man's interpretation is incor- 
rect. And I am going to leave the puzzle just 
where I found it — with premillenarians and 
adventists and others who seem to have more 
spare time for the working of Scripture puzzles 
than for the making of a life. 

For a successful reading of the book of 
Daniel commend me to the average boy. 
Here, as in any other book, he may be counted 
upon to skip the parts he does not understand. 
With the primitive directness of a dog 
hunting rabbits, the boy pounces upon food for 
his own eager life. He does not care a fig for the 
things which Daniel saw and nobody else has 
ever seen. What interests him is the hand- 
some young Hebrew who kept his good looks 
in spite of self-denial, and could not be bluffed 
into doing wrong to save his skin, and sat up one 
night watching lions whose meal he was in- 
tended to be. That is what a normal boy 
would get out of this mystifying book. And 
I cannot think of anything better for us to get 
out of it. Just Daniel, the man, much like 
you and me, and yet enough unlike us — I mean 
beyond us in courageous manhood — to stir the 



170 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

sluggish fibers of our souls. You may get any- 
thing else you please from this book — some 
other time — but just now I want to help you 
find the man. 

And first of all, notice, particularly, where 
you find him: I mean where the book shows 
him to us. You find him just where you rarely 
expect to find such a man as he — in captivity. 
He, with a huge number of his countrymen, 
had been carried off to Babylon, as Belgians 
have recently been torn from their little coun- 
try — and for his own good, as I suppose the 
Germans would have said. Perhaps the Bab- 
ylonian conquerors said the selfsame thing. 
At any rate, you find him where you often find 
such as he, but rarely expect to find him. Ah, 
that is one of the piquancies of life — that you 
find more and better than you are looking for. 
'Twere a sorry world if it held no surprises — 
no good men where you expect bad only; no 
blooms of pity where you think only of stone; 
no precious friendship under the cold skies of 
frustration and loss. To me one of the holiest 
testimonies to God's interest in and rule of 
the world is the way we come upon surprises 
heavenly sweet. 

For example, a Daniel in captivity. Daniel 



DANIEL 171 

not crushed but courageous, with a fire that 
lights for us a whole city, not defeated but 
defiant after a most glorious fashion. Why 
not? You cannot keep down such a spirit 
anywhere, in Jerusalem or Babylon. It is 
buoyant with the lift of a rising soul. Much 
of our plaintive talk about flowers that blush 
unseen and waste their fragrance on the desert 
air is nonsense. Nothing else gets itself recog- 
nized and certified to so certainly as merit does. 
Nothing else is harder to hide than the perfume 
of a fine soul. It is very nearly impossible to 
keep a Daniel submerged. Real ability has 
its own inimitable way of making itself known. 
Do a thing better than the average man does it, 
and somebody is pretty sure to catch you at it. 
Somebody caught Andrew Carnegie winding 
bobbins at three dollars a week. Somebody 
caught Rosa Bonheur, as a tiny child, showing 
her genius by drawing in the sand. Somebody 
caught McCormack, the famous Irish tenor, 
singing rapturously in his village tavern. Some- 
body caught Lloyd George, faithful and com- 
petent in the small tasks of his Welsh boyhood. 
And somebody will quite certainly catch you 
if you do your task well and with a song. 
Ability "will out," more surely than murder will. 



172 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Next time you hear a man say that the "world 
is against him" ask him if it is not more likely 
that he is against the world. Laziness and in- 
competence are always against the world. The 
world cannot use them except under foot. But 
the world has a surprisingly acute way of dis- 
covering any real gift of industry or skill one 
may happen to possess. I suppose it is harder 
for a modern employee, in a great corporation, 
to get himself recognized, than for the workman 
of fifty years ago. But I observe this also: 
that the man who howls loudest because he is 
not recognized has little usually to warrant 
recognition. 

And the same law holds in a higher realm. 
The world is really looking for integrity, for 
conviction, for character. It puts up with 
men of a different sort, partly because it does 
not find the sort it is looking for. Somebody 
tells of a young fellow who was discharged from 
a certain position for declining to adjust his 
conscience to the standard of his employer, 
and who was sought for a new position on the 
express ground of his conscientiousness. I 
do not say it always works like that. The 
world makes a colossal number of blunders in 
conducting its business; but, generally speaking, 



DANIEL 173 

it never bestows its choicest prizes upon any but 
the upright in heart. Sin is not the surest 
thing to find you out. It is sure enough. But 
integrity is still more sure. Tell the truth; play 
fair. Cut out "whatsoever worketh abom- 
ination and maketh a lie," and you have a better 
chance of being found out than the sinner has. 
Try it, and see. You could not hide Daniel in 
Babylon even. The Record says that "this 
Daniel was preferred above the presidents and 
princes, because an excellent spirit was in him." 
That sort of spirit is usually recognized and 
rewarded, even by the man who fails to prac- 
tice it personally. The saloonkeeper prefers 
a total abstainer to serve drinks at his bar. 
The dishonest merchant will have none but an 
honest cashier. The unchaste husband or wife 
demands a chaste partner. Be sure your good- 
ness will find you out. Therefore do less com- 
plaining at the slowness of earth's recogni- 
tions, and do a little more shining in your 
corner. 

But Daniel was not only in Babylon; he is 
discovered as a Daniel in the most unpropi- 
tious place in the city. When we first catch 
sight of him he is surrounded by luxury. And 
there is no more insidious foe to the Daniel- 



174 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

spirit than luxury. Daniel in poverty and hard- 
ship has a better chance for his soul than Daniel 
living on " the king's meat. " Not long ago, two 
of us were guessing the income of a certain 
wealthy man. Was it fifty or a hundred 
thousand dollars a year? Finally we put it 
at the lower figure. And my friend sighed and 
said, "Well, even at that figure, I'd like to try 
it for a year or two." Of course he would like 
to try it. So would you and I. But the ques- 
tion is an open one whether or not it would 
be safe for us to try it. It takes more of a man 
to use fifty thousand a year than to use five 
thousand. Affluence brings with it more perils 
than poverty does. Luxury cuts nerves that 
hardship strings more taut and musical. Com- 
menting on the wolf that suckled Romulus, 
the founder of Rome, Hillis says that "the wolf 
is the true king-maker" — the wolf of cold or 
hunger or pain. I do not expect any ordinary 
man to choose the wolf for foster-mother. 
But it is worth remembering that most of earth's 
greatest sons were wolf -suckled. Against the 
grain of their flesh they came to their kingship. 
In weariness or exile or bitterness of soul they 
found their crown. 

Here, again, before the public eye is the 



DANIEL 175 

wretched scion of a wealthy house. It is said 
that he has cost the State of New York a half 
million dollars in litigation, to say nothing 
of what he has cost the world in recurring 
nausea and loss of respect for the courts. Harry 
Thaw is merely a shining instance of the effect 
of luxury. He is type of what too much spend- 
ing money and too much parental pampering do 
for boys. Born in a cabin and schooled in hard- 
ship, he might have grown to decent manhood. 
Oh, parents, whatever else you do for your chil- 
dren, do not make life too easy for them. God 
hold us back from making it too easy for our- 
selves! Better the hair-shirt and the nails in 
the shoes of the monk than such flabbiness of 
soul as ensues from needless self-indulgence. 
One of our most fearless public servants says 
that it will take the United States fifty years 
to recover from the selfishness of its spirit 
during the present war. To be kept out of war 
may be a sure way to be pushed into the hell 
of shame. What shall it profit a nation if it 
shall gain the whole world — in profits — and lose 
its own soul. Pity we had not a few more 
Daniels in places of power. I still believe that 
with a Daniel-spirit at the critical moment 
in 1914 we might have made the war-god stop 



176 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

to think, and saved our own soul at the same 
time — perhaps without the firing of a gun. 

But Daniel in Babylon. What made sure 
that you would find him? What held him 
steady in the seethe of that warm, pleasant 
tide which sweeps so many of his brethren 
from their feet? Any Sunday school child 
can answer: Courage. Daniel's name is a 
synonym for that. As Abraham stands for 
faith, and Moses for leadership, and Job for 
patience, so Daniel's name spells courage. 
Whatever else he had or missed, he carried a 
dauntless soul. He "never turned his back, 
but marched breast forward." Take him any- 
where in the story, and you never see the first 
flutter of a white feather. Nor was his an 
academic courage. He used it as millions of 
men and women have learned its use to the 
grim music of shell and torture. It was as work- 
able as a trowel in the hands of a bricklayer. 

Shall I show it to you at work in the life of 
the man? For example, at the banquet table 
of the palace. The Record quietly notes that 
Daniel declined to join his table mates in their 
revelries. No bluster, no hatefulness, no Phar- 
isaism, merely a firm and final declination to 
do the thing of the mode. Do you think it 



DANIEL 177 

requires no courage to do that? Why, there 
are millions who could die in trenches more 
heartily than they can say "No" to an invi- 
tation of the crowd. Again and again, as I 
have dropped the probe into the soul of a man, 
I have touched this seat of his trouble. He 
was not vicious. Likely it was entirely true 
that he did not care for the liquid fire he was 
swallowing, and hated himself afterward for his 
share in the revels of his set. If he had lived 
in Puritan days, in which plain living and high 
thinking were the vogue, he could with one hand 
have pushed the tempter aside. But just there 
is the difference with which we must reckon. 
Dissipation is the correct thing in certain large 
and conspicuous circles nowadays. I mean 
that society sanctions certain practices which 
were tabooed a century ago. I need only 
mention what you may see at nearly every public 
dance, and in every popular restaurant, and 
in the ordinary theater. And I need not even 
mention the open scandal of modern dress. 
Billy Sunday says not a word too much in de- 
nunciation of it. It we could drop down upon 
this part of the planet, say from our grandsire's 
day, most of us would have the grace to blush. 
In some respects it is harder to hold hard 



178 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

to the straight and narrow path than it ever 
was for the average man. Partly because 
society has lowered the flag of certain ideals. 
The imprimatur of "good form" has been put 
upon things that surely are not good morals. 
And it takes a Daniel to stay with the crowd 
and not accept its code. Of course one may 
always run away. One may save his soul by 
playing recluse. But that is a coward's way. 
Most of us must live where we are, and earn 
our living here, and make our friendships 
here, and serve God here. We must be in 
the world, but not drowned in the world. And 
to say a quiet unmistakable "No" to the man- 
date of the dressmaker when she would costume 
you indecently; to turn a flushed face from 
whatever makes a man less the man, and our wo- 
men less womanly, needs the courage of Daniel. 
But look at the man again. See him at his 
window, praying when his prayer might cost 
him his life. There is courage in piety. But 
please notice that there is here no hint of osten- 
tation in goodness. The last thing God asks 
from us is a drum-and-fife accompaniment to 
our devotions. One remembers what Jesus said 
about such heralded piety. Daniel did not 
hoist a window that day, to show how loyal he 



DANIEL 179 

was; he merely declined to shut the window 
where he always knelt to pray. He knew that 
his enemies would look for him there, and he 
determined to die, if die he must, with the re- 
spect of God and himself and the men who 
maligned him. Loyalty is the word. God 
does not ask much besides loyalty. 

But multitudes of people have a very anae- 
mic notion of loyalty to God. Their piety 
is such a modest thing it hides its head as soon 
as anybody looks. It is said that one of the 
most tangible benefits of a "Billy" Sunday 
campaign is the new courage he puts into Chris- 
tians. They do not look foolish any more 
when prayer and the Bible are mentioned. 
They begin to talk about the soul as if it 
really were their chief possession. And they 
mention Jesus with a light in their eyes. Why 
not? You hate a man who acts ashamed of 
his friend. You despise a man who speaks 
apologetically of his mother. And when a 
man hangs his head at Jesus's name, either he 
got the wrong Master, or he ought to be ashamed 
of himself. 

"Ashamed of Jesus! yes, I may^ 
When I've no guilt to wash away; 
No tear to wipe, no good to crave. 
No fears to quell, no soul to save. 



180 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Till then — nor is my boasting vain — 
Till then, I boast a Saviour slain; 
And, O, may this my glory be — 
That Christ is not ashamed of me." 

But see the man's courage in another aspect. 
See it working in the den which has given the 
man his chief fame. Some who might have 
passed successfully the other tests — the banquet 
test and the window test — would fail in the den 
test. It was so lonely down there, save for the 
presence of God. And there was nothing to 
do but wait for morning to come. You can- 
not fight lions; the most you can do is to keep 
to your own corner. Sometimes a great battle 
is a relief to the pent soul. Waiting touches 
us in the marrow of our bones. Anything but 
to wait. But it was in patient, prayerful wait- 
ing Daniel showed how courageous he was, To 
hold still when your heart aches with utter 
loneliness; to keep back presumptuous hands 
from the ark of the covenant; to watch the 
black hole overhead until morning breaks into 
it, ^and all the while to be passionately sure of 
God, is to give the topmost witness of the 
Daniel-spirit. 



* XIV 
RUNNING AWAY FROM GOD— JONAH 

Fishing lore is proverbially unreliable. When 
we want to characterize a particularly prepos- 
terous and incredible narrative, we call it a 
"fish-story." I do not know why it should 
be so, but men otherwise truthful cannot stick 
to the facts of their fishing exploits. Men who 
can measure with exactitude the distance from 
earth to the sun, and weigh the fine dust on a 
butterfly's wing, seem utterly unable to report 
the precise length and weight of the trout they 
have hooked. We believe them when they 
talk about the market, or the war, or their 
love affairs; but when, forsooth, they fall into 
converse about their piscatorial adventures, 
that is another matter. 

I wonder if this is what ails the story of 

Jonah. For some reason a good many serious 

people have never taken the story seriously, 

and scoffers have had no end of fun over it. 

Is it the fish episode makes the trouble? Some 

years ago the then pastor of a certain famous 
181 



182 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

church published a clever little volume in which 
he attempted to clear the reputation both of 
the fish and of Jonah — particularly of the fish. 
He cited a more or less credible modern in- 
stance of a sea monster which had actually 
swallowed a man whole, and then gave him up 
unharmed by the experience. 'Twas a clever 
apologetic. And I recall that it strengthened 
my faith so much that I forthright preached 
a sermon on the theme — a sermon which I have 
never felt called to repeat. 

For I have a diminishing interest in prodi- 
gies, and a proportionate increase of interest 
in folks. I do not think I could be enticed to 
the bay for sight of the identical fish that res- 
cued Jonah. I have a sort of grievance against 
that particular fish. He not only swallowed 
Jonah, but the man's reputation too; so that, 
if Jonah were alive to-day and had the alterna- 
tive, I believe he would rather take his chances 
of swimming to land than to see his reputation 
as a man and a prophet disappearing with him- 
self down the throat of the whale. 

Jonah, the man, then — and, quite incidentally, 
Jonah, the interior passenger of a fish. As a 
man Jonah was so much like the most of us 
that we meet his counterpart every day. I 



JONAH 183 

have changed my reading of the Bible. I used 
to be looking for the prodigies in it. The more 
unusual its characters seemed, the more of a 
Bible I thought it was. I reveled in the differ- 
ences between the folks who walked there, in 
the gloaming of history, and the folks who 
walk our streets and sit in our churches. To- 
day all that is changed — for me. To-day I 
find myself challenged by the startling simi- 
larities between folks then and folks now. To- 
day I find my full brothers and sisters on the 
pages of the Bible. Nay, to-day I find myself 
there, as I am and as I want to be. To-day the 
Bible is a living book, because my friends live 
there — because I myself live there. Jacob, 
David, Peter, Saul — I know them all in my 
friends and in myself. And I love to talk 
about them, as one loves to talk about his 
friends and himself. 

But Jonah! You will need no formal intro- 
duction, after a moment. You will recognize 
him as the man you met this morning on the 
way to business. Jonah's trouble began with 
a wakening. If he could have stayed asleep 
in soul, he might have been spared his igno- 
minious voyage and its dramatic sequel. Jonah 
did not want to wake — any more than we do. 



184 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

He was a Jew, as we are Anglo-Saxons, in gen- 
eral, and North Americans in particular. The 
less he heard about the pains and perils of peo- 
ple beyond the confines of his native city, the 
better pleased he was. His motto was the 
same as that so many Americans have adopted 
during the past three years: "Safety first" — 
especially for ourselves and our profits. And 
when, somehow, Jonah got awake to the need 
of Nineveh his trouble began. 

Just as ours does. It is so much more com- 
fortable to live one's own life. Every exten- 
sion of interest means heartache and burden 
for others. If we could only escape hearing 
about the agonies of Armenia and the hungry 
children of the poor! If we could shut out the 
visions spread before us in our newspapers! 
"Never," said a celebrated Frenchman, some 
years ago, "never was mankind so universally 
sad as at the present time." It is the sadness 
of seeing so much that needs to be done. Our 
grandsires had far less than we have to worry 
about. They had the weather, of course, 
and the live stock, and the children, and the 
poor family down the road. But the world 
was very much smaller then; and its most 
tragic news was relatively stale when it got to 



JONAH 185 

grandfather. He did not bother greatly about 
what went on in Louisiana so long as things 
went well in Massachusetts, and vice versa. 
To-day, the world is a vast whispering gallery, 
in which the cries of distant need pound against 
our ears with deafening urgency. And the 
cries constitute our call. 

I have wondered, a bit, how Jonah got his 
call to preach in Nineveh. The matter looks 
very simple when you read about it in the story. 
God said something to Jonah. But how? Dif- 
ferently from his way of speaking to us? I do 
not think so. My conviction is that God talks 
just as plainly to us as he ever talked to men. 
Our disadvantage is that we know how to ex- 
plain away so many divine "callings." In 
some way or other Nineveh got on Jonah's 
nerve. Maybe he had heard about it from 
travelers. Perhaps Jonah had visited the place. 
And the sin and misery of it struck into his 
heart — just as the havoc and horror of the war 
have grueled us; just as injustice and bestial- 
ity are increasingly disturbing our content. 
So Jonah got his call, just as we get ours. 

And Jonah did not like his call. He did not 
mean to go. He did not go — until his soul 
had been flailed. And who shall guess the sad- 



186 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ness of the man as he stepped aboard the little 
vessel at Joppa. 'Twas the sadness of one who 
wakes to a great need, and does nothing to 
relieve it. I have been asked a good many 
times if I would not like to see Europe after the 
fury of war has passed. Yes — and no! Why 
should I want to see gutted cathedrals, and 
ruined cities, and graveyards miles long?. Why, 
unless I propose to help guarantee the world 
against a repetition of such f rightfulness? Why, 
unless I try to cure my own sadness by min- 
istry? Have you watched a crowd gather in 
the street about some wounded pedestrian? 
Everybody crowding up, and each jostling the 
other in the desire to see for himself. And 
each carrying down the street a strange, sick- 
ening feeling. That is dissipation, as truly 
as drunkenness is. It is dissipation, in unpro- 
ductive sorrow, of strength that ought to be 
spent in making the world better. One of the 
last ways to honor God is by moping over the 
wickedness of Nineveh. The thing to do is to 
go to Nineveh and "preach the preaching" 
God bids you. If God shows you a world's 
"open sore," it is for the purpose of appointing 
you to help heal it. If he lets you feel the sor- 
rows of the poor, it is that you may help to 



JONAH 187 

abolish poverty. If he leads you through the 
barren lands of your own life, it is that you 
may enter the "reclamation service." 

Years before I had any official relation to it 
I used to visit occasionally one of the great 
rescue halls on the Bowery in New York city. 
And being a spectator only, I always brought 
away with me a huge depression. 'Twas the 
sight of that mass of human driftwood cast 
up by the storm. But I noticed, even before 
I realized the significance of it, the radiance of 
the missionary's face. Witness of the same 
havoc that staggered me, he carried the sunniest 
smile. Of course. He was more than a spec- 
tator — he was a human saviour of men. He 
was helping rebuild and rerig those poor dere- 
licts for a voyage to a forgotten port. He was 
helping lost men to find themselves. And no 
man who does that can be melancholy. There 
is no other joy in the world like the joy of re- 
demption. I wonder if this was what Jesus 
meant when he talked of leaving us his joy. 
The world has a good many ways — more ways 
than ever before — of amusing itself. Some say 
we are pleasure-mad, these days. And much 
of the fun is so disappointing. But there is one 
sort that never disappoints. It is the "fun" 



188 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

of making the world better. It is the happiness 
of rebuilding broken lives. It is the ecstasy 
of putting back the song into songless souls. 
And it was precisely this that Jonah missed 
when he said "No" to the Nineveh call. 

But Jonah's trouble did not end there. 
Troubles are links in a chain, and you never 
know how long the chain is until you pick up 
one link. Jonah could not stay at Jero- 
boam's court and be comfortable in his disobe- 
dience. If he did not propose to go whither 
God bade him, then he must go somewhere 
else. If he could not bury his sorrow at home, 
then he would drown it at sea. Anywhere, any- 
how to escape the accusing voice! Any jour- 
ney to get rid of God and duty — and self ! Alas ! 
he did not know until he tried it, a thing we 
rarely believe until we try it — the impossibility 
of running away from God. So he engaged 
passage on a foreign craft, with a foreign crew, 
bound for a foreign port. He was willing to 
leave everything else behind, if, with everything 
else, he could leave conscience. Everybody 
knows the impulse. And soon or late every- 
body knows the futility of it. Not long ago 
there appeared before the criminal court of one 
of our cities a man with haggard face and 



JONAH 189 

hunted eyes. He had come back to give him- 
self up to the authorities for a crime committed 
successfully years before. During the inter- 
vening years he had lived upon the spoil of his 
successful crime, always seeking to get away 
from it; using the stolen money to help him 
forget how he came by it; always more melan- 
choly and broken. And he came back to find, 
in pardon, the God whom he could not escape 
in flight. The story might have been written 
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that fearless preacher 
of conscience, in a companion volume to The 
Scarlet Letter. For, as you remember, Arthur 
Dimmesdale planned the same thing — peace 
by running away. He had everything ar- 
ranged. He would put the sea between him 
and his secret remorse. Amid the new scenes 
of the Old World he would forget the old scenes 
of the New World. But he never made the 
voyage. Next day, in sight of all, he found in 
forgiveness, at home, the God whom he would 
vainly flee from abroad. Man, you can't get 
away from God. You may escape your cred- 
itors, and your sharp-tongued neighbors, and 
your rebuking-eyed friends. But you cannot 
escape God. He will meet you at the landing 
where your ship docks. He will be in your 



190 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

company, every mile of the outward voyage. 
Nay, he will walk up the gangplank — the best 
Friend you have in all the world, trying by 
all means to save you from yourself and the 
silent, pitiless corrosion of your soul. 

But we have almost lost sight of Jonah. For 
the sake of the examples I have just been using 
I ought to have selected a different man from 
Jonah. Jonah, on his way to Tarshish, was 
not a bad man fleeing from the scene of his sin, 
but a good man running away from duty. He 
was court-preacher to Jeroboam, much sought 
and admired. There is not the first hint that 
he had failed of any part of his duty at home. 
So far as we know he was correct in personal 
life, sound in doctrine, and fearless in proclaim- 
ing the truth. The duty he was seeking to 
escape was an extra duty, an outside obligation, 
as we might say. It had not been included in 
his original commission, nor in his earlier con- 
secration of himself. It came to him much 
as the extra duties present themselves to us — 
unsought and unwelcome. 

Every normal person reckons with a certain 
number of duties which he expects to perform. 
He expects to pay his bills, and to provide for 
his children, and to give some part of his income 



JONAH 191 

to the Lord. He allows for measles and sick- 
headache and an occasional appeal on behalf 
of Foreign Missions. In other words, he 
accepts life subject to these and certain other 
limitations. And whenever he stops to consider 
the matter he probably congratulates God upon 
having so dutiful a servant. But, some day, 
a new duty shows its face. Some day a new cry 
harrows his heart. Some day a new ideal 
comes and stands commandingly before him. 
Some day he sees God laying possessive hand 
upon more than a tenth of his income. Some 
day he finds an unexpected thorn in his flesh, 
or in his soul. And what then? Why, then, 
he knows how Jonah felt the day that celebrity 
set sail for Spain. He wants to get away from 
God and every reminder of him. As Elijah 
groaned under the juniper tree: "It is enough; 
now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not 
better than my fathers." 

But Jonah went to Nineveh, at length. He 
took a roundabout way. He met tragedy, 
en route, but he ultimately reached the port of 
destination, and delivered the message from 
which he tried to escape. Nor shall we ever 
find the case different. God does not change 
duty to suit our whim. Eventually we do 



192 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the thing we declared we would never do. (I 
mean, if we find peace with ourselves.) God 
gives us a good many fresh chances to do our 
duty, but he does not abate the duty — any 
more than he abrogates the law of gravity to 
save broken bones, or the law of harvest to 
give wheat for tares. Thank God that Nine- 
veh is on the program still, spite of our obdu- 
racy. Thank God that you still have an oppor- 
tunity to do the duty you said you would not 
do. Thank God for the privilege of shriving 
your own soul in performing, even tardily, the 
appointed task. Suppose that the commission 
had been recalled before Jonah honored it? Sup- 
pose your friend dies before you bless him? 
Suppose the sick recover before you visit them? 
Suppose some readier servant does the things 
you were sent to do — to make this a better 
world? Then you must carry to the end of 
the journey the sorrow of "what might have 
been." 

But notice another trait of Jonah. He 
waxed angry with God for being kind to Nine- 
veh. Forgetting the forbearance which had 
furnished him with another chance, he wanted 
Nineveh to have no second chance. After he 
had girded up his loins and stiffened his lips 



JONAH 193 

for the delivery of his scathing message, he 
waited anxiously to see the doom accomplished. 
And when the people he warned repented, and 
God averted the thunderbolt, Jonah flew into 
a rage with God. Did you never meet any- 
thing like that, in yourself? We do so love to 
see people get their deserts rather than mercy. 
I do not read any more the published reports 
of criminal trials. They were not good for me. 
For I was too prone to take the State's case 
against the defendant. And having taken the 
part of prosecutor, I must get a verdict against 
the man in the box. If the jury disagreed, or 
rendered a verdict of innocence, I had a sense 
of grievance. So I do not read such narra- 
tives now. It is so much easier to approve 
God when he visits the iniquities of the fathers 
upon the children than when he shows mercy 
to children's children. 

"What doth God require of thee but to love 
mercy?" Notice the word, to "love mercy." 
I do not think we have learned as yet to love it, 
on earth or in heaven. We tolerate it, and even 
approve it mildly. Sometimes we practice it 
furtively; in our institutions, our industry, our 
personal contacts with God's other children. 
But we could hardly be said to love it. And we 



194 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

particularly dislike to be proved bad prophets. 
Many a boy has been whipped chiefly because 
it was promised him. At any cost to Nineveh, 
let us keep our reputation. 

Do you recall the closing scene? Jonah 
scolding God, in the same breath, almost, for 
letting a gourd die and for failing to destroy 
a city? Poor Jonah! And poor we! For I 
have known the same man to be merciful to 
his dog and unmerciful to his bookkeeper. I 
have seen the same woman try to save a 
wounded moth that had scorched its wings and 
yet spurn some poor butterfly of a woman 
who had been caught in the flame. Thank for 
a merciful God to grow toward ! 



XV 



WHERE THE TIDES MEET — JOHN 
BAPTIST 

In a beautiful bay, on which many happy 
days of my boyhood were spent, is a stretch of 
rough water we called "The Rip." I do not 
know what men call it now, but I doubt if they 
have improved upon the old name. At "The 
Rip" the water was always rough. Even on 
calmest days, when sails hung idle on their 
spars, there was always commotion at "The 
Rip." And on stormy days let the inex- 
perienced beware. For there the currents met, 
and where currents meet it is always rough. 
Baltimore has been described as "a Southern 
city on Northern soil." It might perhaps be 
equally well described as a "Northern city on 
Southern soil." The result is quite the same 
— commotion. Where opposing tides meet the 
water is always rough. And it was rougher 
here than in any American city of its size 
during the agony of Civil War. In no 
other city perhaps would the clash with Fed- 

195 



196 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

eral troops have occurred. Certainly not in 
the North, where sentiment flowed pretty gen- 
erally one way. And as certainly not in the 
South, for an equally obvious though very 
different reason. Here the tides of convic- 
tion met — the tide rushing down from the 
North, and the tide which swept up from the 
South. Of course it was rough; it always is 
where the currents meet. 

And nowhere more disturbingly than in the 
individual. When duty and desire, or past and 
present, or tradition and truth meet in the same 
breast, you may have many consequences, but 
you will never find smooth sailing. Some- 
times I think that the only thoroughly con- 
tented people are those who live altogether 
in the past or altogether in the future, letting 
no disturbing voice reach them from across the 
Great Divide. Just say that the past was all 
good and only good, and pull your easiest chair 
before the fire of bygone days and dream your- 
self away. Or say that the past was all bad 
and only bad, and fix your soul on the morning 
reddening the East. In either case you may 
hope for a fairly contentful time. The tide 
runs one way. 

But the moment — well, for example, there 



JOHN BAPTIST 197 

was John Wesley. Our Episcopalian friends 
are correct in their affirmation that Wesley 
lived and died a priest of the Established 
Church. He had a harder time to break with 
it than some of his critics have had in accepting 
that break, with its consequences. If any 
friend of his early life had shown John Wesley 
a picture of himself, forsaking the pulpit for a 
preaching place on a tombstone or at a street 
corner, I think that Wesley would have stamped 
on the picture and cried his friend out of his 
heart. But if Wesley loved the dignities and 
solemnities of the church, he loved men even 
more passionately. He must win them to his 
Lord, though he went to them across his 
deep-set predilections. So the cross currents 
met in the soul of the man who has left such a 
mark upon the generations since. 

Or take another John- — John Calvin. It is 
said that after he had finally worked out his 
famous "doctrine of decrees" — that doctrine 
which damned babies, for the glory of God, before 
they were born, and left part of mankind no 
more hope than a finger has, caught in a band- 
saw — after he had it thoroughly worked out 
to logical perfection, he confessed it "a horrible 
decree." There speaks the heart of the man. 



198 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

As a man John Calvin would have spared the 
life of a moth; as a theologian he must put out 
the light of hope for his full brothers and sisters. 
As a man he would have taken the hand of 
the arch heretic Servetus; as a theologian Calvin 
must send him to the fagots. Guess, then, 
"The Rip" in his own soul where the opposing 
currents met. 

Or take still another John — the John we are 
to study — John the Baptist. I suppose that 
most people think of him as a man who pre- 
ferred a diet of locusts and wild honey; and 
if that was his preference, he was welcome to 
it. I think of him, on the contrary, as a man 
who would have relished every dainty on 
Herod's table if conscience would have let him 
have it. He was the stuff they make martyrs 
of. Somebody tells of grafting the pupa of a 
spider to the pupa of a butterfly. But I am 
not interested in the scientific nicety of the oper- 
ation. I am trying to imagine the sort of life 
that strange hybrid lived afterward. Spider 
and butterfly — love of darkness and love of 
sunshine, passion of crawling and passion for 
flight, cunning of cruelty and innocence of 
play, all in one tiny body. Men are like that — 
good men as well as bad men. Both instincts 



JOHN BAPTIST 199 

in them — heavenly and hellish. Both worlds 
pull them — the old and the new. If they could 
forget one, I am sure they could be happy in the 
other. There is no such creature as an "un- 
happy" dog— I mean in the higher meaning 
of the word. He may be uncomfortable when 
he is hungry, and sad-eyed when you whip him. 
He may even grieve himself to death on his 
master's grave. But he is never unhappy in the 
sense in which his master is unhappy. For 
the dog is a creature of one world. He cannot 
experience the hell of being a devil and wanting 
to be an angel. He knows nothing at all about 
those furious contesting tides which meet 
and foam in a human soul. 
Sings Browning: 

"When he wakes with himself, a man's worth something: 
God stoops o'er his head: the devil looks up between his feet: 
Both tug: he's left himself in the middle: 
The soul wakes and stirs." 

Yes, and the waking is as painful as it is lumi- 
nous. That is what ails some of us. We 
could be happy in the thing we are doing if we 
could forget the thing we ought to do. We 
could enjoy our narrowness if we could blot out 
the larger visions God has sent. We could be 
content at our nets if we had never seen Jesus. 



200 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

So the tides met and raged in John. And you 
can hear the lash of their combat, and taste the 
brine of their spray, throughout his life. John 
was too much of a Hebrew to be a successful 
Christian. He had seen just enough of the 
glory in the face of Christ to make him ill at 
ease in the old faith. With heroic persistence 
he was trying to be a citizen of two common- 
wealths at the same time. He was making his 
journey with shoes that did not fit. He saw 
the light in his father's house, but we never 
see him go in at the door. Gaunt, fearless, un- 
compromising figure in whom the tides met. 

Notice the way another John introduces him. 
"There was a man sent from God whose name 
was John." I like that description, "a man 
sent from God," but I should not enjoy it so 
much if John used it concerning himself. In 
one of my early parishes I had the dismal 
experience of following a man who frequently 
spoke of himself as a "man of God." From 
the pulpit he continually reminded his hearers 
that he had been sent by God to them. He 
accepted all sorts of special courtesies as the 
just due of a man of God. And after he left 
it transpired that the path he trod was scarcely 
"straight and narrow." From that day to 



JOHN BAPTIST 201 

this I have had a foolish aversion to the phrase, 
especially when men use it concerning them- 
selves. 

"Men of God." Of course there are. Every 
man who is living a clean life, or practicing 
kindness, or helping to stanch the world's 
gaping wounds is "a man sent from God." 
Every woman who puts her ideals above her 
idols, or carries on her heart some just part of 
the world's sorrows, is "sent from God." But 
I do not want them to tell me so in words. 
I want them to credit me with sufficient in- 
telligence to read their credentials. "Let your 
light so shine," said Jesus. We shall not be 
apt to improve upon the prescription. Now and 
again a representative of some special cause, 
an agent for this or that, comes to me with 
the preliminary assurance that "God sent him 
to me." Maybe God did. God uses as un- 
likely instruments as any that have sought to 
win my contributions for their work. And if 
God did send them, the chances are that I shall 
find it out. Nor will the discovery be hastened 
by their telling me that God sent them. I like 
to make my own discoveries in saintliness. 

No Scotchman need tell me that he hails from 
the land of Burns and heather. He cannot bid 



202 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

me " Good morning," or name the price of the 
fabric he is selling, and avoid telling me where 
he was born. His accent gives him away. 
And so does the accent of the man sent from 
God, whether his name be John or William. It 
will be strange if you can talk five minutes with 
him and not discover his hailing place. He 
will rarely need to tell you that he is a Chris- 
tian. His accent will give him away. No, 
John Baptist did not need to tell his hearers 
that God sent him. They would know it from 
the subtle flavor of his speech not less surely 
than by the theme of his preaching. I am sure 
he never troubled to tell men he came from God. 
But there is one significant thing he did 
say about himself by way of self -description. 
He called himself a "voice." And I like that 
immensely. It is great to be a voice. Most 
people are alarmingly content to be echoes. Now, 
an echo in its way is a wonder. You can re- 
member practicing it on the barn or against 
the hill in your childhood. What a deal of 
breath you wasted, just for the fun of hearing 
your voice come back to you. I shall never 
forget the echoes of the alpine horn at one place 
in Switzerland. Seven distinct answers one 
could count, they said. To tell the truth, I 



JOHN BAPTIST 203 

never counted more than five, but I was willing 
to charge the difference to my ears and accept 
the wonder. But I do not like human echoes. 
The last thing for a son of God to be is an echo 
of somebody else — even Jesus Christ. What 
is lacking in the most perfect phonograph rec- 
ord ever made? I do not need tell you that 
something is lacking. Pay five or seven dollars 
apiece for your records — you cannot buy it. 
It cannot be caught on a plate and reproduced 
through a horn. 'Tis the voice you miss. The 
most expensive talking machine ever built 
deals in echoes only. And an echo is not the 
same as a voice. 

John was a voice. He could have saved his 
life by consenting to play echo. That grim 
head on the charger names the cost of being 
a voice when society prefers echoes. Society 
still prefers echoes. It sets styles for our 
clothes, for our opinions and for our morals. 
The more nearly we are like other people, the 
easier we are to classify and the more com- 
fortable to have around. Whereas a voice 
is different. It thrills with personal quality. 
It makes other people sit up and take notice. 
It may even disturb the neighborhood's sleep. 
Whatever else be said concerning him — for 



204 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

praise or blame — Theodore Roosevelt is a voice 
— harsh, disturbing, truculent, but a voice. 
His bitterest enemy never accused our Colonel 
of being an echo. Whereas there are some of us 
who feel that, during the past three years, we 
have needed a voice more than we have needed 
anything else at the national capitol. Maybe 
we have had one; but at best we are not quite 
sure. Oliver Wendell Holmes at his best was 
an echo; Wendell Phillips was a voice. Eras- 
mus was an echo; Luther was a voice. Pilate 
was an echo; Paul was a voice. 

O, the imperial dignity of being a voice — and 
not for self but for others. I do not enjoy hearing 
a man lift his voice too high on his own behalf. 
It is too much like the hawker in the street, 
crying his own wares for the sake of his own 
precious pocket. But when a man becomes a 
voice for the sufferings and needs of others, 
thank God. One who heard Jenny Lind sing, 
toward the close of her professional career, said 
that the loneliness and poverty of the orphans 
for whom she was building a home by her 
income throbbed and pleaded in her songs. 
They say that the hands on the heroic-sized 
statue of Lincoln, recently unveiled in Cin- 
cinnati, are typically a woman's hands. You 



JOHN BAPTIST 205 

might expect them so. His sad tragic life was 
a ministry. His hands were out not to get 
but to serve. He became a voice for the bet- 
ter instincts of two races. Men said of Jesus 
that "never man spake like this man." But it 
was not what he said that was so different; it 
was the way he said it. "He spake as one hav- 
ing authority, and not as do the scribes" — those 
professional echoes of convention. And when 
he spoke it was as a voice for others. Have you 
stopped to consider how little Jesus asked 
for himself? Not even comfort, and to be let 
alone at his prayers. When his life hung in 
the balance, he declined to lift a finger to turn 
the scales in his own behalf. The appeal he 
made in the Garden on the night of his be- 
trayal — when he besought the soldiers to take 
him and let his friends go free — was typical of 
his whole beautiful life. Always a Voice for 
others; asking nothing for himself except for 
the sake of others. Some day we shall have 
voices like that. We have them in embryo, 
now. Voices to speak, not for profits, but for 
the poor; not for self, but for service. 

But the man who called himself a voice, 
what did he say? If he had scamped his work 
in telling the truth, he might have eaten at the 



206 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

table with Herodias and her daughter. Evi- 
dently, he said some harsh things — for which 
Herod respected him. To use the stinging 
phrase of Garrison, in "The Liberator," he was 
as "harsh as truth." But truth does not need 
to be harsh in order to be truth. Some people 
seem to think it does. The more their speech 
hurts, the better warranted they think it is — 
and they thrust the blade a little deeper, up 
to the hilt perhaps. I am more and more sus- 
picious of those self-constituted prophets who 
feel themselves commissioned to tell other folks 
the truth. The rusty edge of a He will make 
its victim wince as piteously as will the clear 
edge of the truth, and leaves such an ugly 
wound. And even the truth needs to be spoken 
in love. Itjs not enough that you "get it out 
of your system," so to speak. Truth, at its 
best, is redemptive. It builds again the ruined 
temple of the soul. 

Do you recall how John introduced Jesus at 
their first public meeting? "The next day 
John seeth Jesus coming . . . , and saith, 
Behold the Lamb of God." Why didn't he 

say, "Behold the Lion of Judah"? Because, 
at its heart, the burning message of the Bap- 
tist had always been redemptive. In his wild, 



JOHN BAPTIST 207 

tempestuous way he had been giving his life 
to make bad people good. When he told them 
the truth he was trying to bless them. And for 
the completing of his task, he looked not to a 
roaring lion but to a slain Lamb. When we 
drop the role of the lion for the passion of the 
Lamb it will be perfectly safe to tell men the 
truth, all of it. 

One word more. The last sound of John's 
voice breaks from a prison. You would hardly 
recognize it as the same that rebuked Herod to 
his face. There is agony in it, and tears. The 
Kingdom had not come in as John dreamed 
it would come. The Man whom John described 
as coming with "his fan in his hand," to separ- 
ate the chaff from the wheat, had been too 
undramatic for John. The Lamb had been 
too gentle and unresisting. "Art thou he that 
should come," groaned the voice behind the 
prison walls, "or look we for another?" You 
recall the answer. I do not even know that it 
satisfied John. But the more important ques- 
tion is whether it satisfies you. Is Jesus Christ 
man enough to be your Master? Is he kingly 
enough to be King of your life? Can you 
imagine a more competent Friend? 



XVI 
CHANGING HIS TRADE— MATTHEW 

Not long after a certain college examination 
I met the examiner in a restaurant. He had 
lost his terror for me. Whereas, before, I had 
gone in suitable awe of him, now I ventured to 
smile on equal terms. Was I not done with 
him and his subject, and with a good mark to 
my credit? But as I passed his table he shot me 
a quizzical glance and said, "Peck, I gave you 
a good mark on your examination; but I could 
not discover what one part of your paper had to 
do with the theme." 

"Nor had it," was my brazen reply; "I 
merely put it in to fill up. I could answer the 
first and last of your questions readily; but 
having no information to match the second 
question, I filled a sheet or two with a romance 
of my own manufacture, hoping you would read 
only the beginning and end of the paper." 

And he smiled, and I smiled back — not alto- 
gether comfortably — and passed out of the 
restaurant, my emotions somewhat mixed. 

208 



MATTHEW 209 

Not altogether dissimilar is my mood with 
respect to my subject now. Really, I thought 
I knew something about Matthew. Offhand, 
I might have said that I knew a great deal about 
him. But the moment I attempted to put to- 
gether my information concerning him, I dis- 
concertingly found that it would hardly fill a 
page. His name, and his trade, and the book 
he wrote — these things, and his call by Jesus, 
exhaust the record. If I had introduced him 
to you five minutes ago, you would have said, 
as you do when you meet a celebrity, "O, yes, 
everybody knows Matthew." Exactly; but 
what does "everybody" know about him? 
What, except the meager data just mentioned, 
does anybody know about the man? It is like 
remembering Paul for his tent-making trade 
and some vague service of Jesus; or Byron 
by his club-foot and a poem or two; or Grant 
as a farmer, with the inevitable cigar stuck in 
his mouth; or Roosevelt as descended from 
the Dutch, and near-sighted. For a man whose 
name is as familiar as Matthew's is, the record 
is surprisingly scanty. Of course there is his 
book, the Gospel of Matthew, but I challenge 
you to find in it any satisfactory portrait of 
the man. 



210 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Well, then, I must make up my story from 
the colorless fragments that remain. See him in 
the only characteristic photograph we have. 
"And as Jesus passed forth ... he saw a man, 
named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of cus- 
tom." In other words, Matthew was at his 
post — and a detested post, as any neighbor 
could have told you. But, for the moment, I 
pass over the unpopularity of Matthew's voca- 
tion, in the estimation of his neighbors. What 
concerns us just now is Matthew's personal atti- 
tude toward his task. Did he hate it, and shirk 
it? I meet so many dissatisfied people: dissat- 
isfied with the thing they seem set to do; house- 
wives who, with a more or less holy hatred, hate 
dish-washing and mending; clerks who begin 
with despising their desk and their wages, and 
frequently end by despising their employer; 
doctors who wish they had studied law or gone 
into business; ministers who long ago went 
stale in the cure of souls — yes, ministers who 
merely go through the motions of ministry, 
having lost the passion of our Lord. 

To be out of sympathy with one's task — I 
sometimes think this is the tap-root of the 
world's unhappiness. People lusting to do 
somewhat different from the thing they are 



MATTHEW £11 

charged with doing — you cannot make such 
people happy. Happiness is not in the task; 
happiness is in the soul of the worker. And 
the surest way to reach a more congenial job is 
to smile and sing over the present one. "Give 
me the man who sings at his task." Sing be- 
cause the chances are that the thing you are 
doing is the thing God needs to have you do. 
At least it needs to be done, probably; and our 
clay is not so much finer than that of the man 
whom God will set in our place when we relin- 
quish it in disgust. Most of the world's impor- 
tant work is prosy — admittedly so, designedly 
so, 'necessarily so. It must be performed in 
overalls and grime and sweat. But what is 
that against the dignity and imperativeness of 
it? Said a man to me recently, "I can't get 
away from the office long enough to hunt for 
a better job." Precisely. Seldom can we be 
excused honorably from present duty while we 
hunt up a pleasanter one. And, for that mat- 
ter, the world's finest advancements are seldom 
found by hunting for them. They are awards 
to the fervent in spirit. When "Bob" Fitz- 
simmons was asked the secret of fistic success, 
he replied, "Hit from where your hand is." 
And so he gave the master-word of all success. 



212 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Strike your blow from where you are. Bless the 
world in what you are doing. The breezes of 
our sighs never forward our craft on its voyage. 

But let me discriminate a moment. There 
are two kinds of discontent, the one as benefi- 
cent as the other is blighting. Out of noble 
discontent have come all betterments and re- 
demptions. The last doctrine for a prophet 
to preach is stand-pat-ism. But for men's 
discontent with the ways of the stage-coach we 
should have no express trains. But for protest 
against the havoc of whisky we should have 
registered no victories over the saloon. But 
for outcry over the exploitation of childhood in 
industry, no child labor laws would be on the 
statute books to-day. There was recently 
opened to traffic the most remarkable railroad 
bridge in the world, spanning the East River, 
not far from Hell Gate. Trains now run direct 
from Florida to Boston. That bridge is a mon- 
ument, not so much to engineering skill as to 
noble impatience with ferrying cars across the 
East River. So all the world's betterments are 
harbingered and brought in. Redemption itself 
is the crimson register of the divine discontent 
with "things as they are." 

Not of such redemptive spirit am I thinking 



MATTHEW 213 

just now. Rather, of the spirit which puts 
Matthew out of tune with his task. Dishonor- 
able must be the work in which a man cannot 
invest himself with self-respect. I recall so 
well the alabaster columns in Saint Mark's 
Cathedral in Venice; and the candlei which the 
guide set behind this column and that. It 
looked as if the columns were afire at the 
heart. Work is translucent too. It always 
glows when manhood or womanhood is behind 
it. And just when you are most sure that 
nobody is looking, Jesus of Nazareth passes by, 
as he did by Matthew's post at the customs, 
long ago. 

But before I speak further of that, notice 
something else about Matthew's task. I mean 
the disrespect in which his neighbors held it. 
From that day to this — and I know not how 
many centuries before Matthew plied it — the 
trade of the tax-gatherer has been unpopular. 
For some reason every normal citizen has a 
chronic grievance against taxation. There is no 
other bill he pays with so wry a face, no other 
debt he is so tempted to swear off. Sometimes 
I think we have a special conscience toward 
taxes, a conscience so elastic that it can be 
stretched over all sorts of lies. Few people seem 



214 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

to think truth has any application to tax-re- 
turns, providing we are not caught dodging. 
And I suppose it was so in Matthew's day; 
perhaps more so. The taxes which Matthew 
gathered, confessed national shame — like the 
indemnity paid to Germany by Belgium for 
the cost of being ravaged. Every patriotic Jew 
hated Rome; every farthing he paid to support 
her eagles intensified his hate. And, to crown 
the humiliation of the present instance, Mat- 
thew was a Jew collecting taxes for Rome. Any- 
thing but that! Nobody stopped to inquire 
what sort of man he was: Matthew's trade 
put upon him the bar-sinister. 

But let us waste no heat on ancient bigots. 
Let us, rather, ask ourselves how much broader 
we are to-day. The other morning I passed 
a group of laborers returning from work in a 
tunnel. They were smutted and grimy of 
course, not presentable for a church or a parlor. 
Only a painter like Millet or a poet like Kip- 
ling would discern in their aspect any beauty 
to celebrate. And I am frank to say I had to re- 
mind myself, sharply, that the grime was not 
in their souls. So difficult is it for us, still, 
not to grade men by their calling, so well-nigh 
impossible to see the man behind the overalls 



MATTHEW 215 

or the pickax. I do not know the kind of 
man Matthew was when Jesus passed by, 
but I do know the kind of man his neighbors 
took for granted he was, judging him by his 
trade. "Why, he blacks his own boots," 
sneered certain critics to Lincoln concerning a 
man in the public eye. In their estimation 
that finished him, that he could stoop so far as 
to black his own shoes. "So," replied Lincoln, 
in his slow, droll fashion; "well, whose boots 
should he black?" There are few vocations 
that degrade men, but there are hosts of men 
who degrade their vocations. "If I cobble 
shoes more carefully than you prepare your 
sermons" — protested a shoemaker when the 
clergyman was commiserating him upon the low- 
liness of such a trade. I need not complete the 
sentence. God save us from looking down upon 
any honorable toil. 

Matthew was not necessarily a crook be- 
cause his calling gave scope for crookedness. 
But his neighbors were gleefully willing to 
credit him with all the sins which his trade in- 
vited. As we sometimes cynically affirm, con- 
cerning this one or that, "All he lacks is oppor- 
tunity." Pardon me if I drop in an incidental 
reason for never saying that thing again. It 



216 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

gives the utterer away. Dr. Deems used to 
say that one of the meanest propensities of 
human nature is for a man to sit for his own 
photograph and then write his neighbor's name 
on it. Every time we say that all a man lacks 
of being a rogue is opportunity to be one we 
confess judgment upon ourselves. No, I do 
not want to believe that, even. And as to 
the sneer in its wider application, it is most 
desperately false. "No, by all martyrs and the 
dear, dead Christ," it is not true. You can 
find refutation of it in your own soul at its 
best. 

And this grim world shines with countless 
refutations. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, 
playing with the pretty jewels in the box, is not 
every woman. Faust, selling his soul for his 
desire, is not every man. Doubtless, there is in 
every nature a "grain," following which the 
soul may be split wide open. But I spent a 
laborious quarter hour last summer trying to 
split an oak log in the grain. And, finally, I 
left the ax head sunk in the log. There are 
oaken souls and there are oak fibers in every 
soul. Sin dulls its edge upon them, as upon 
Joseph under fire, and Moses in Pharaoh's 
court, and Daniel in Babylon, and Paul at 



MATTHEW 217 

Rome. Yes, and a long, bright array 
since. "Not for children or wife or lands or 
fame will I mix in my cup one drop of the poison 
of treason," shot back William of Orange to 
the tempters from Spain. "The cup which my 
Father giveth, shall I not drink it? " said Jesus, 
facing his cross. No annals can hold the record 
of men's vindication of their own souls. When 
a man falls you know it, but when he stands 
steady and fine, none knows perhaps but himself 
and his God. Who shall say that Matthew 
was not better than his calling? 

But suppose the worst? Then, remember 
that Jesus came by. I do not think we have 
ever entertained the full significance of his 
advent. We still think of him as a heightener 
of the polish on bright souls rather than as 
restorer of the luster of souls that have ceased 
to shine. We still commit him to repairs in- 
stead of redemption. We still eliminate from 
the list of his beneficiaries the desperately sin- 
sick, lest he waste his time. But do you recall 
the thing he said next in the Record, following 
the call of Matthew? I think perhaps it was 
said in defense of the call of Matthew, when 
the Pharisees were in a panic at such presump- 
tion. This is what he said: "They that be 



218 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

whole need not a physician, but they that are 
sick." That is the gospel note. It is the only 
note that makes it a real gospel. Suppose 
Matthew had been as black as they painted him; 
suppose he had lived down to his opportunities 
for extortion and graft and what beside? All 
the more reason for Jesus to pass that way. 

Some years ago I became much interested in 
a campaign to save a hospital. And I wonder 
if we realize all that it means to save a hospital. 
It means saving an institution that fights for 
a human life — even a disreputable life, even a 
pauper's life— so long as there is a breath left 
to fight with. To bring up a patient from the 
deeps of the valley of shadow is the hospital's 
crowning achievement. That is the hospital's 
ethic. Alas ! it is not yet the ethic of the church, 
except in theory. In practice we make liberal 
allowance for hopeless cases — not quite worth 
the Great Physician's while. During the Sun- 
day campaign a poor vagabond was converted 
and joined the church. In a way we were glad, 
not knowing how utter a vagabond he had been. 
Or, cognizant of the history of the case, we 
timidly hoped he would stay cured. And then 
he lapsed, and nobody was surprised. And 
then he disappeared, and nobody grieved. 



MATTHEW 219 

And then, after an interval of silence, came back 
the staggeringly beautiful word that he had 
found his feet again and was trying to walk in 
the way everlasting. For whom is the gospel 
best news except to such as he? "The Son of 
man is come to see and to save that which was 
lost." There are no hopeless cases to the 
Great Physician, except such as will not submit 
themselves to his skill. I do not believe that 
Jesus ever gave up hope for Judas until Judas 
committed suicide in his shame. 

But whatever Matthew's record, he had the 
sanity to try to improve upon it. When Jesus 
said, "Follow me," Matthew started to do as 
he was told by the highest Voice he had ever 
heard. And so I know that he had in him the 
making of an apostle. Think for a moment 
of the venture he made when he left his seat 
at the customs, and his income, to follow Jesus 
Christ. The path was new. No telling before- 
hand where it would lead or what it might cost. 
You never can predict the cost of discipleship. 
All you can say is that, in the event, it will be 
worth all it costs — and immeasurably more. 
"There is no epic of the certainties." You 
cannot omit the hazard, and write the story 
of a great fortune. Great fortunes are gained 



220 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

through risk, not by the slow accumulation 
of interest. You may hold a fortune by care- 
ful investment, but you rarely acquire it in 
that prudent fashion. You cannot write the 
story of a great love, omitting the pain and the 
sigh. One may love moderately and escape 
heartache, but one cannot love greatly except 
at the possible cost of a broken heart. Every 
supreme achievement, whether in art or science, 
represents somebody's risk. And I do not see 
why, apart from hazard, we should expect the 
full rewards of a Christian life. "There is no 
epic of the certainties," here. One must stake 
somewhat on Jesus Christ. If we could dis- 
count beforehand all the perils and crosses, a 
Christian life were as uneventful as crossing a 
ferry. New continents of blessing he always 
beyond uncharted seas. But we know the 
Pilot. 

One more glimpse of Matthew. He wrote 
a book. Partly it is record of his adventure 
in Jesus Christ. Mostly it is his tribute to 
Jesus Christ. It tells what he found when he 
obeyed the command; what he gained by giv- 
ing up the business of tax-collector. It is a 
wonderful story; but, in its way, not more 
wonderful than you can write concerning our 



MATTHEW m 

Lord. If you ever sincerely follow him, you 
will want to write a story, or compose a song, 
or give a testimony, to the grace and giant-hood 
of your new Lord. 



XVII 

ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE— 
NATHANAEL 

One of our modern novelists makes his story 
turn upon the momentary glimpse of a face in 
a car window. The train moved on, but the 
face remained deeply photographed in the heart 
of the beholder. Consciously or unconsciously, 
he was always looking for that face; asking 
the meaning of its sadness, wondering what it 
might hold for him. In crowds, on streets, in 
lonely places, he was always looking, as Dante 
watched for Beatrice in the streets of Florence. 
And, in the event, he found her face again. 
So Nathanael's face flashes upon us in the 
Bible. Dignified, earnest, clean, it is the face 
of a man we should like to meet again. We 
should be glad to know him as well as Philip 
knew him. But the glimpse is all the hurrying 
record affords. His path and our own never 
cross again. For a moment he stands vivid 
and appealing before us; then is gone. I am 
not of those who try to identify him with the 

222 



NATHANAEL 223 

Bartholomew of the twelve. I leave him 
Nathanael, and like him thus so well that I 
want you to study with me this flashlight 
glimpse of him. 

As stories go, there is not much to say. I 
cannot name a thing he ever did except to come 
to Jesus. I cannot even name a cross he bore. 
These are days of the efficiency test. Every- 
thing and everybody is gauged by reaction 
to that test. All of us seem to hail from Mis- 
souri, and insist upon being "shown." But 
the greatest thing anybody can ever show us is 
the soul of him. Not the number of bricks he 
can lay, not the money he can make, not the 
economies of administration he can effect, not 
even the converts he has brought to our Lord — 
none of these, but the soul of the man himself, 
is his crowning demonstration. Rubens was 
more than his pictures. MacDowell was more 
than his music. Edison is more than his many 
inventions. And "Billy" Sunday is more than 
his best sermons — else his sermons are hardly 
worth hearing. To such recognition we shall 
return some day. I do not mean that we shall 
depreciate activity. Ours is an active God. 
But the best witness of the activity of God is 
not a wheat field, nor yet an ocean lashed into 



224 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

foam, but the goodness he inspires in the life of 
a man or a woman or a little child. Efficiency? 
Certainly. But suppose that instead of asking 
first what a man can do, we ask what sort of 
man he is. 

The greatest thing that Grant did was not the 
crushing of rebellion, but being so fine-souled 
that he would not listen to an unclean story; 
so quietly brave that even in his physical agony 
none ever heard him whine. The noblest 
contribution that Lee made to the Confederacy 
was not his sword and his fortune, but an honor 
so complete that when friends showed him how 
to make some easy money, he replied, 
"Gentlemen, my honor is all that I have left, 
and it is not for sale." And the unique pre- 
eminence of our Lord is not in his miracles, 
nor in his wisdom, nor yet in his bearing of a 
cross, but in that heart which broke for the sins 
of his brethren. So the best thing I can say 
about Nathanael is the best thing to be said 
about any man : he was a good man. 

I have wondered why Philip went after him. 
It might have been a fruitless errand. There 
was a tense moment in which Philip seemed 
likely to fail as I have failed, times almost with- 
out number. But evidently Philip knew that 



NATHANAEL 225 

Nathanael was interested in goodness for its 
own sake. And, by the way, it is a great 
achievement to be interested in goodness as 
goodness. Hosts of people are interested in 
goodness as a revenue producer. It "pays 
to be good," they say. Pays in wages, pays in 
friends, pays in esteem. Sometimes I shiver 
when I hear men detail the material advantages 
of living a good life. Preachers even will tell 
their young people that the best way to get on 
in the world is to be Christians. I have heard 
the tithing principle extolled on the ground 
that the man who practices it is more likely to 
be a rich man. 

Of course godliness pays. 'Twere a queer 
world in which unrighteousness had an equal 
chance with goodness. I should be ashamed 
of a religion which left its possessor nothing 
but the tame satisfaction of possessing it. But 
to reckon in cash returns the awards of a Chris- 
tian life seems little short of profanation. 
When Richard Croker was reproached for mer- 
cenary interest in politics he replied, quite 
frankly, that he was "in business for his pocket 
all the time." And where is the ethical ad- 
vantage of the Christian who is in the business 
of piety for his pocket all the time? 



226 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

I had a friend who raised carnations for 
market. I have walked through his green- 
houses with him many a time. And, in a 
sense, he was proud of his blooms. But his 
pride was that of vendor. I never saw him 
bury his nose in the soft face of a flower, or lift 
a pink as a chalice from which to drink beauty. 
Those carnations were worth so much per hun- 
dred. I do not think he had any other price 
for them — in his soul. Another friend of mine 
collected paintings. I am sure he loved them 
for what they were. I have seen him on his 
knees, almost, before them. But when he 
told me how much more he could obtain for a 
certain canvas than he paid for it I was sorry. 
It seemed like commercializing a shrine. So 
sometimes a boy loves his mother. He loves 
her for the cookies in the jar and for the mend- 
ing of his clothes. He loves her for the way 
she makes his bed and kisses him to sleep. He 
loves her for her Christmas gifts to him, and for 
her cool hand on his fevered brow. Then, some 
day, he learns to love her not for what she 
does for him but for what she is in womanhood. 
And some day he misses her, as one misses 
sunshine when day is gone. 

So with goodness. The most wonderful 



NATHANAEL 227 

thing about goodness is goodness, not what it 
will buy, not what it will do, but what it is. It 
is a flower not to be priced but to be possessed. 
It is a beauty not for sale but for soul. It is 
a presence for the enrichment of life. Seriously, 
I am not interested in showing you the way of 
life so that you may make more money. I do 
not ask you to make friends with God for the 
sake of more friends on earth. I am not exalt- 
ing Christ as a prophylaxis of fear and remorse 
— though he is that, divinely. I want to help 
you fall in love with goodness as goodness — as 
one loves his friend, not for anything that friend 
can do but for all the friend is. 

But we must not leave Nathanael too long 
under the famous fig tree where Philip found 
him. When Philip found him he found a man 
with a prejudice. Everybody has one, at least. 
With some people it is Theodore Roosevelt, 
with others, Woodrow Wilson, with still others 
the Kaiser. With some it is prayer-meetings, 
with others foreign missions, with others music 
or poetry. With my mother it was Irish Cath- 
olics. One day, when her gorge against them was 
particularly strong, she said she wished all the 
Irish Catholics in the world could be herded 
on one ship and the ship scuttled. You can 



228 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

hardly imagine how it sounded — from her. 
It was so harsh, and she so gentle. But pre- 
judice is usually harsh, and always irrational. 
The best excuse I could find for most of our 
prejudices is the same as for our noses; they 
belong to us. 

But Nathanael was not a bad man with a 
prejudice. His was the prejudice of the good 
man. He had his mind made up against every- 
thing in Nazareth — just as we have against 
Germany or Japan or Mexico. And when 
Philip announced the hailing place of Jesus, 
quick and hot came back Nathanael with his 
prejudice: "Can there any good thing come 
out of Nazareth?" Evidently, Nazareth had a 
bad name; and as a good man Nathanael was 
committed against it, as our sires were against 
church organs and novels; as some of us are 
against billiard tables and the drama. The 
more godly Nathanael became, the more he 
distrusted Nazareth. His was the heated, un- 
compromising prejudice of the good man. 

And I want to pause to say a kind word for 
it. Give me the active prejudice of a good 
man, in eternal preference to boneless indiffer- 
ence. When a man tells me that he loves all 
churches alike, I am pretty sure he will never 



NATHANAEL 229 

be worth his salt to any one of them. He 
hasn't conviction enough to yield a good-sized 
prejudice. Conviction usually narrows a man, 
in the same way you narrow a piece of steel to 
make it cut. You cannot mow a field with the 
broad side of a steel billet, or shave with a cube 
of metal. You must heat it, pound it, put an 
edge on it. So conviction narrows a man inev- 
itably. He cannot be tolerant as he once was of 
injustice and fraud. He cannot any longer 
wink at the shameless havoc of alcohol, or the 
blighting of childhood. 'Tis the cutting edge 
of his conviction makes him useful to his Lord. 
Luther was narrow, and I am sorry; but his 
narrowness served the world better than did 
the breadth of Erasmus. Beecher was narrow, 
in a big-souled way; but the keen edge of his 
narrowness helped cut more fetters than did all 
the "sweet reasonableness" of Emerson and 
his kind. Frances Willard was narrow, I sup- 
pose, in her championship of prohibition; but 
she will be remembered as a prophetess of a new 
day, now gloriously dawning. Even Jesus 
was narrow. He would have no divided alle- 
giance, no "hyphen" in discipleship. "He 
that is not for me is against me," he said. He 
cut deep as the surgeon does. He preached 



230 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the straight and narrow road that leads at last 
to the light. 

So I accept as inevitable a certain mixture 
of prejudice with conviction. It is only when 
prejudice turns its back to the light that I quar- 
rel with it. Nathanael was different. While 
he had convictions he was open to new and 
bigger ones. And Philip was eminently wise 
in handling the prejudiced man. Philip did 
not blast at him, as we incline to do. He did 
not resort to the super-folly of calling Nathan- 
ael hard names. He merely said, "Come and 
see." And Nathanael was man enough to ac- 
cept the invitation. I am not afraid of any 
prejudice that breaks off with that. Somebody 
tells me of an old lady who was prejudiced 
against the telephone. She never wanted one 
in the house. With all her ransomed powers 
— and certain others not to be thus described — 
she protested. Prejudice of course, like that 
of the up-state New Yorker who hated railroads 
so cordially that he boasted he never had set 
foot on a train, and never would. But one day 
the family persuaded her to submit her ear to 
the ridiculous-looking contraption on the wall 
— and she heard her only boy's voice call 
"Mother." 



NATHANAEL £31 

You will recall how Ericsson, the inventor, 
discovered what was missing in his life. He 
said he hated music; and he thought he told 
the truth. He was a man of metals and meas- 
urements, with no ear for the wonders of har- 
mony. Then one day, reluctantly, he heard 
Ole Bull play. And as the wizard played on 
and on, mists gathered in the other's eyes, and 
he swallowed hard to keep down the tide of 
joy. And the music ceased, and the inventor 
raised his head to plead: "Go on. I never 
before knew what is lacking in my life." 

I do not care how prejudiced you are if you 
will only "come and see." If sight does not 
kill it, you can always go back to your preju- 
dice, and find it unharmed by exposure to the 
truth. "Come and see" what prohibition can 
do for a community. Hold all the contrary 
opinions you please, but be willing to submit 
them to the acid-test of fact. Do not take 
anybody's word — not even the testimony of 
the Times, that in one West Virginia town the 
jailer, who makes his living by feeding his 
prisoners at so much per head, protests that 
he is starving. "Come and see." Come and 
see how much better kindness works than hate 
does. They say you cannot get work out of a 



SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 



gang of men unless you swear at them. Don't 
you believe it until you have really tried the 
other way. "Come and see." And at the 
crest of your coming, come as Nathanael did: 
"Come and see" Jesus. Do not take, at a 
hundred per cent, the representations or mis- 
representations of anybody. Nobody can tell 
me how an orchid looks, or a peach tastes. 
Nobody can ever describe to me what fear is, 
or love. And nobody can adequately portray 
Jesus. There is only one way to find out what 
he can do for a heart out of tune. Let him try. 
"Come and see." Nathanael came, prejudice 
and all, to our Lord. 

Now see what happened. "Jesus saw Na- 
thanael coming to him, and saith of him, Be- 
hold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" 
What a thing to say in welcome of a prejudiced 
man! There were many other things, doubt- 
less, which Jesus might have said, and not all 
complimentary. He might have said that 
Nathanael was provincial and narrow and sus- 
picious. We should hardly like to miss the 
opportunity to tell Nathanael just what we 
thought of him. It seems so cruelly important, 
sometimes, to give folks their photographs as 
we see them. But Jesus said the very best 



NATHANAEL 233 

thing to be said about Nathanael. He called 
him a man without a yellow streak: "an Is- 
raelite in whom is no guile." He broke up the 
ice in Nathanael's soul by saying the best 
thing he could say of him. 

Ordinarily, the surest way — I might say the 
only way — to get the best out of a man is to say 
the best thing you can of him. Call your child 
a fool, and he will very probably justify the 
appellation. Tell a man he is a thief, and he 
will likely conclude that he might as well have 
the game with the name. Let people know 
the worst you think of them, and you challenge 
them to live down to their reputations. Once 
in a while the condemned man determines 
to beat his reputation, but not often. Ordi- 
narily he justifies it. Yes, I recall that Jesus 
called some of his contemporaries "vipers," 
and "whited sepulchres," and "hypocrites." 
No doubt they were, and so they remained 
to the end of the story, so far as we know. 
It seems almost impious to confess it, but, 
sometimes, I have wondered what difference 
it would have made in the result, if Jesus had 
been as patient with the Pharisees as he was 
with Peter and Judas. At any rate, our com- 
mission is clear: we are to challenge people to 



234 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

live up to the names we give them. We are 
to give names to live up to, not down to. Never 
is a sinner so ashamed of his fault as when he 
knows that you expected somewhat better 
from him. 

But when the ice began to break up in Na- 
thanael's soul it went almost too fast — danger- 
ously fast, as ice does in rivers in the spring. 
I mean that Nathanael dropped his prejudice too 
easily. And Jesus laid a restraining hand. 
He said: "You believe in me because I saw 
you before you saw me. But that is not the 
best I can do. Thou shalt see greater things 
than these." There is always danger of being 
too quickly and superficially satisfied — even 
with Jesus Christ. As if one should be satis- 
fied with seeing the President play a good game 
of golf. As if Luther with his violin were all 
the Luther the world needed. Jesus is so 
much diviner than any word he ever uttered, or 
any miracle he ever performed, it seems a pity 
to be content with less than his best. Na- 
thanael was in danger of going away satisfied 
with discovering how wise Jesus was. And 
Jesus had to say, "Thou shalt see greater 
things than these." 

I do not ask how smart your God is: how he 



NATHANAEL 235 

holds the world in mesh, how he spins planets 
as boys spin tops. How just is he, and how 
kind? How much better world is he making 
ours? Alas! we have not yet given him the 
chance to show. We have been content with 
a God of laboratories and tides. We have 
filled our eyes with wonder. But we have not 
yet offered him ourselves to be his greater 
miracle. "Thou shalt see greater things than 
these." 



XVIII 

THE MAN OF FIRE AND FROST- 
PETER 

A more motley assortment of men than the 
twelve would be hard to imagine — unless you 
were to call the roll of your intimates. Fancy 
trying to justify, before a dispassionate critic, 
your selection of your personal friends. Peo- 
ple whom you claim because you love them; 
people you accept because they love you; peo- 
ple that anybody would like, and people that 
nobody but you thinks of liking. Invite them 
to your home, some evening, and bid them 
enjoy themselves on the common platform of 
friendship for you — you will feel as if you 
had opened all the cages of a menagerie and 
bidden the animals to pass a pleasant hour. 
If "a man is known by the company he keeps," 
irrespective of his reason for keeping it, you 
may experience difficulty in clearing your repu- 
tation. 

So with the strangely assorted group of men 
whom Jesus gathered about him. I do not 

236 



PETER 237 

wonder they were suspicious of each other, 
and occasionally called one another hard names. 
To begin with, they had in common nothing 
but their love for their Lord and his love for 
them. Did you ever study the group as Da 
Vinci portrays them in "The Last Supper"? 
Young men and men of middle age, volcanic- 
looking men and placid-faced men, men of 
whom you could ask anything and men whom 
you would scarcely dare to ask the price of a 
postage stamp. On what selective principle 
did Jesus choose them? Fortunately, I do not 
need to decide. I accept them as his friends, 
and I take heart for myself and for humanity 
when I see what he made of such common and 
ill-assorted clay. Tradition says that every 
one of them laid down his life in deathless testi- 
mony to his love for his Lord. You could not 
ask angels to do better than that. 

But I am not concerned, just now, with the 
motley group; I am interested in the most 
motley man of them all — Peter the paradox, 
and the best-loved one of the twelve. I say 
"best-loved," for I do not think there is any 
doubt that he is. At least, more people feel 
at home with him than with any other member 
of the company. If our likes jumped with our 



238 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

admirations! But how seldom they do! Some 
of the most admirable people I have ever known 
were just as likable as guideposts and heroic- 
sized statues. Admiration is a gift you can 
control. You can measure it off — so much 
admiration for so much admirableness — just 
as you can pay five or seven dollars for a pair 
of shoes, and consider them worth the price. 
A man gives a hundred dollars to the poor, and 
you admire him for it. Or he goes without a 
tremor to the operating table, and you admire 
him for that. Or he plays the business game 
with scrupulous honesty, and treats his wife 
as a queen, and you admire him for those 
things. But that is not to say you like him, 
and save him a place in your deepest heart. 

Love is a very different sort of gift; some- 
times an altogether illogical and irrational gift. 
Like the wind, "it bloweth where it listeth," 
and you can hardly say why it blows north 
or why south. If love waited upon admiration, 
some of us would be bachelors still. I mean 
that it was not as result of the admiration we 
elicited that we won the women who put up 
with us. And, for that matter, some of the 
most admirable women I ever knew had been 
passed by in the hunt for wives. I could not 



PETER 239 

understand it. Nor do I think they understood 
it. They had every qualification, apparently, 
to win esteem and praise. But, somehow, you 
cannot light a domestic altar at the cold torch 
of admiration. Nor do we get our friends 
in that rational fashion. Time and again I 
have reasoned out the case for bestowing 
friendship here or there. It was as plain as 
the nose on one's face. Yonder was the man 
to tie to. But I could no more tie up to him 
than I could moor my boat to moonbeams. 
And perhaps I gave my friendship to one who 
neither deserved nor desired it. 

And, for that matter, I wonder where the 
majority of us would come out if God condi- 
tioned his love upon his admiration. No doubt 
God recognizes a handsome soul when he meets 
it. So quick is he to bestow . praise that he 
credits us for trying to be the men and women 
we never become. But there is no gospel in 
loving the lovable, any more than there is in 
paying one's bills or smacking one's lips over 
a peach. "Herein is love, not that we loved 
God, but that he first loved us." "Scarcely 
for a righteous man will one die: Yet, perad- 
venture for a good man some would even dare 
to die. But God commendeth his love toward 



240 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ 
died for us." This is the gospel — that "while 
we were yet without strength" — or beauty, or 
excellence, or piety — "Christ died for us." The 
Pharisee, out in front of the temple, reciting 
his own virtues, was candidating for admira- 
tion. Whereas the publican, beating upon 
his shamed breast, cried for love. Jesus did 
not deny that the Pharisee was admirable, nor 
did he claim that the publican was lovable. 
This is all he said, that the man who pleaded 
for a love which he did not deserve carried away 
a diviner gift than the other. 

So we come back to Peter — the best-loved 
man of the twelve. Not the most admired; 
merely the best loved. Comparing him point 
by point with other members of his group, as 
one compares horses or dogs or automobiles 
at a "Show," Peter is far less admirable than 
John or Thomas. I cannot imagine anybody 
substituting Peter's name for Daniel, and sing- 
ing, "Dare to be a Peter." I have heard boys 
exhorted to be like Enoch or Elijah or Stephen 
or Paul, but I never yet heard a boy exhorted to 
be like Peter. Yet, what hosts of friends he 
has always had, more than John or Andrew or 
Philip! 



PETER 241 

Shall I refresh your memory of him? Then 
see him, first, as a natural man. No actor at 
all was Peter. You could not have assigned 
him a part in a play — unless he wrote the play. 
I have heard it said that the plays in which 
David Warfield figured were written for him. 
He could not fit himself to a ready-made role; 
the role had to be fitted to him. But Peter's 
limitations were still more marked. Peter 
never could have played his part twice alike; 
he would have been sure to introduce some 
extemporaneous fines — he was so essentially, 
so alarmingly, natural. You never needed 
to ask if he meant what he said; he could not 
say anything else — without stammering. Take 
him in any one of his characteristic attitudes: 
jumping out of the boat to go to Jesus across 
the water; drawing up his feet when Jesus 
started to wash them; hacking off a servant's 
ear in the garden that dreadful night; swear- 
ing that he never knew his Lord — always him- 
self, whether admirable or reprehensible, al- 
ways himself. No posing, no preening of 
feathers, no pursing his mouth to befit his 
speech: just a plain, blunt man confessing 
either his love or his fear. 

Such a man was Peter. And as such we like 



242 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

him. I think we nearly always like that sort 
of a man. At least we know where to find him, 
which is no small comfort in these ultra-con- 
ventionalized days. Years and years ago — 
so far back that I have forgotten all the circum- 
stances — I saw a litter of colored rabbits: pur- 
ple rabbits, pink and green — every color except 
the one God assigned them. They attracted 
attention enough, to be sure. All the passers- 
by paused to stare at the rainbow-hued crea- 
tures. But I heard afterward that the dye 
killed them. Certainly it kills a host of arti- 
ficially tinted souls. If God wanted blue and 
pink rabbits, I take for granted he could have 
made them that way, just as he has given us 
green parrots and flaming birds of paradise. 
And if God liked kalsomine and fresco applied 
to a woman's face as well as we men are said 
to like it, I suppose that God could just as well 
have finished them in that fashion. 

So few of us are willing to seem what we are. 
We are forever "fixing up," as my grandfather 
did when he finally submitted to the photog- 
rapher. For years the family had teased 
him to sit for his picture, and he always ob- 
jected on the ground that the ordeal would be 
the end of him. (It was, for he died not long 



PETER 243 

after.) Maybe 'twas the caricature killed him. 
Such a wooden-looking human the photographer 
caught. Not a glint of the light I loved to see 
dance in his eyes; not a whisper of the passion- 
ful voice; not a flutter of the breast against 
which he had so often held me convulsively 
— just an artificial, unlovely thing. 

"To thine own self be true." I do not mean 
that we are to display all the rawness of our 
souls. Thank God for the conventions which 
help us hold the menagerie in leash; but God 
forgive us for always hiding our hearts. I do 
not think that Pope was thinking particularly of 
trade when he said "An honest man's the noblest 
work of God." There are forms of dishonesty 
worse than those you encounter in business; 
dishonesties of the soul; artificiality, pretense. 
Give me a man whose soul looks through. 
He may not be admirable, but at least he gives 
me a chance to love what he is. If his battle 
is hard, I want to see the blood-spatters on 
his uniform. If his heart aches, let him not 
shut the doors against me. If he loves me, I 
need to know it. I do not think God intended 
life to be a masquerade in which we guess at 
the persons beneath the masks. The most 
lovable child is the natural child. The great- 



244 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

est artist is the one who succeeds in concealing 
his art. And the real man shows his real face, 
whether for praise or for blame, as Peter did. 

But there is more to be said about Peter. 
He was an ardent soul who sometimes blew cold. 
And I like his ardor, even though sometimes it 
most tragically cooled. Somebody says that 
he who never flats never sharps. And I can 
excuse my friend for dropping below a dead 
level occasionally, if, now and again, I see him 
soar. See the hot flush climb Peter's face when 
Jesus prophesied his own cross. I like that 
fiery protest of love, mistaken as it was. If 
my friend loves me at all, I want him to cry 
out against my pain, even when my pain is my 
salvation. There are plenty of tepid folks now, 
folks who never either rage with indignation 
or freeze up with fear. God be thanked for the 
Peters who can blaze with love. Or see him on 
the Mount of Transfiguration wanting to turn 
carpenter and house the celestial glory. "Mas- 
ter, it is good for us to be here," he said; "let 
us build three tabernacles." Of course it was 
the wrong thing to say, but I like him for say- 
ing something. So many people accept the 
glory and never say a word: accept life and 
health and love without a sign of recognition. 



PETER 245 

"Let the redeemed of the Lord say so." And 
let the man whose cup overflows, take time to 
spill over with gratitude, even though he may 
say the inappropriate thing — as Peter did on 
the Mount. Then hear his ardent avowal 
of loyalty. "Though all should forsake thee, 
yet will not I." Everybody knows how little 
warrant Peter had for saying that. And I think 
that most people have been ashamed of him for 
saying it so loud. But I am glad he said it, 
even though he failed to live up to it. And I 
am sure that Jesus loved him for the outburst, as 
you love your children for promising to do all 
sorts of impossible things out of love for 
you. 

O, yes, I know how some of you smug men 
feel about it. You take great pride in telling 
how much better it is not to be a Christian, 
than to try to be one and fail at the task. I 
wonder. The obligation of a Christian life is 
not in the vow but in the nature of the case. 
There is no duty incumbent upon the church 
member, and not binding upon you. And I 
would rather see a man fail in the effort than 
to hear him compliment himself for not making 
the effort. Before the cock crew, that fateful 
night, Peter had broken his ardent vow; but 



246 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

nothing could ever kill the sincerity of the 
vow, or rob his soul of the glory of it. 

God has his best chance with an ardent soul. 
All the world's best work is done by warm 
hands, backed by burning hearts. Nobody 
will ever know how many Romans objected to 
the gladiatorial combats of their day. But 
they objected mildly. They said such things 
were wrong and ought to cease. Then Tele- 
machus blazed — foolishly, if you please — and 
the combats ceased. If somebody had blazed 
when Belgium was violated, and when the Lusi- 
tania went down! Not notes but blazing was 
what we needed. Better a blaze, even though 
it kindled war. Listen: "I would thou wert 
cold or hot . . . Because thou art neither 
cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." 
Lukewarmness is the most hopeless tempera- 
ture for a soul. If you were hot, I might help 
God to fashion you. If you were cold, I might 
strike a spark of opposition. But because 
you are merely "interested" in what I say, 
and quietly approve the teachings of the 
church, and stand with your hat off to Jesus 
Christ — and never fling yourself at his feet — 
I sometimes despair of being able to win you 
to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. "Woman," 



PETER 247 

they say, "loves a stormy lover." So does 
God. At least lie loves a stormy Peter better 
than he loves these decorous, self-reserved 
disciples who never break into the flame of a 
passionate avowal of loyalty. 

But there is one more thing to be said about 
Peter. And it contradicts our common im- 
pression of him. The common impression 
is that Peter was a brave man who turned 
coward; a strong soul who went piteously 
weak. But suppose we read him differently? 
Matheson says that Peter was a timid man 
trying to learn to be brave. His lapses were 
falls back into the bog out of which he was 
striving to climb. The telltale white in his 
face was his normal, moral complexion. There 
is nothing harder to beat out than timidity, 
but you can love the man who is fighting to kill 
it in his own soul. I can remember how impa- 
tient my father was at my shrinking from tak- 
ing part in prayer meeting. He did not know 
what fear is. And he could hardly be patient 
with it in anybody else. But looking back 
upon those days, I believe it took more 
courage for me to say a dozen words for Jesus 
Christ in public than it would have cost him to 
stand up before a firing squad and be shot at. 



248 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

At least I learned sympathy for the man who 
is trying to cut against the grain of his nature. 

There is splendor in that. A good many 
people get credit for doing things as natural 
to them as flying is for a bird or swimming for 
a fish. The quiet soul is praised for its quiet- 
ness, much as if you praised a violet for not 
being a sunflower. And the man who never 
knew the cold fingers of fear is called a hero, 
whereas the compliments ought to go the other 
way. The real hero is the man whose knees 
shake at approach of danger. The real chev- 
alier is he who has to fight down all sorts of riot 
within his own soul. The real Christian is 
the disciple who has hardest work to keep 
within sight of his Lord. Trust God to know 
where to bestow the crowns, even if we do not ! 

What is this people say about not being 
"called" to do this or bear that? So Peter 
might have said of his timid heart. But Jesus 
calls no man to impossibilities. If he assigns 
a big task, he will add the glory of it. Peter 
won his fight. He killed cowardice, finally, 
in his life. For the note which comes back to 
us, from the closing scene, is the voice of a man 
unafraid. 



XIX 

THE HIDING OF SELF — ANDREW 

For some reason, Andrew's face is missing 
from Matheson's Gallery of Immortals. Pri- 
marily, of course, such omission is the author's 
affair. Each man has perfect right to arrange 
his own Hall of Fame. If the historian Froude 
chose to give Henry VIII a niche as "the patriot 
king," none of us need object. We are at per- 
fect liberty to call Henry anything else we 
please. While The Old Curiosity Shop was 
appearing in serial form, readers besought 
Dickens not to let Little Nell die, but the 
eminent novelist seemed to think it his busi- 
ness to dispose of his characters as he wished. 
The public might decline to read the story, but, 
at least, he was writing it. Who shall tell me 
what to include in my letter? Who shall select 
for me my friends? Who shall undertake to 
bestow my admiration? Each must name the 
figures for his personal Hall of Fame. 

Hence I accept Matheson's omission of An- 
drew from his list of Bible immortals. But 

2i2 



250 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the Bible does not leave him out. It gives 
him a safe and luminous place. Nor can we 
ever leave out the Andrews, any more than 
we can leave the flour out of bread. Others 
may supply the yeast, or the salt, or the water; 
but Andrew is the flour. No home, no church, 
no community can get on without him. He is 
not brilliant; he is merely indispensable. 

"One feast, of holy days the crest, 

I, though no churchman, love to keep; 
All Saints — the unknown good that rest, 

In God's still memory folded deep: 
The bravely dumb that did their deed, 

And scorned to blot it with a name; 
Men of the plain, heroic breed, 

Who loved Heaven's silence more than fame." 

Such a man was Andrew, so modest that I am 
not sure he would like to have a sermon preached 
about him; and a personal headline in the 
papers would spoil his night's sleep. 

Of course he does not shine like his famous 
brother. If there were truth in the occultist's 
notion that each soul burns with a special color, 
Andrew would be neither red nor blue but a 
neutral shade. Let Peter glow crimson, and 
John purple, and Thomas indigo; Andrew will 
appear gray. I do not mean that he was neu- 



ANDREW 251 

tral. On the contrary, you could be more cer- 
tain where to find him, on a given day, than you 
could be concerning his volcanic brother. 
If he never glowed, neither did he pale. No 
chameleon property about Andrew — just a quiet, 
neutral tone on which you may rest your eyes. 

I admit that he suffers by contrast with his 
brother, as a gray -toned canvas does in a gal- 
lery of high-colored paintings. Sometimes it 
appears sheer misfortune to be brother to a 
bishop or a senator or a sovereign. I recall a 
plain-faced, kindly man whose kinsman had 
been elected to high office. Doubtless my 
plain-faced friend was proud of the honor done 
the family. He would have been quick to re- 
pudiate the imputation of jealousy. Nor do I 
think he was jealous. But there grew in his 
eyes a look of sadness, as if he were mutely 
apologizing to the world for not being of heroic 
size. Taken by himself, he was an average 
man of real industry and loyal soul; contrasted 
with his brother, he looked Lilliputian. And 
with the pathetic, self -abasing look in his eyes 
he slipped out of life, one day, "unwept, unhon- 
ored, and unsung." 

But the world needs his kind: needs more 
hewers of wood and drawers of water than cap- 



252 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

tains of industry and first-grade prophets. Said 
a youngster when asked what office he held in a 
newly formed club, "I am the private mem- 
ber." Every other boy held an office: he alone 
was left to play rank and file. In the days 
following our Civil War they used to say that 
you could not spit out of a window without 
hitting a colonel. But colonels were not so 
numerous when the fighting was being done. 
Then one colonel sufficed for a regiment. The 
rest, barring a few officers, commissioned and 
non-commissioned, were plain "privates. And 
for the fighting of its fiercest battles; for the 
baking of its bread and the sweetening of its 
bitter draughts; for the marching of its weary 
miles, and the actual gathering of its harvests, 
the world needs file upon file of privates. 

A recent review article discusses the question 
whether or not Shakespeare had discovered the 
common man. Perhaps he had. But he knew 
better than to portray him and expect the 
audience to be interested. Kings and counts, 
prime ministers and military commanders, 
sumptuous women, and jesters in silk — these 
fill his plays. The day of the common man 
had not yet dawned. And, for that matter, 
it has not, even now, advanced far toward noon. 



ANDREW 253 

We still pay homage to gold lace and gowns 
that rustle; still bow before the "Seats of the 
Mighty," whereas, in our souls we ought to be 
weaving a chaplet for the brow of the common- 
place man — except that he would hardly know 
what to do with it. 

O "the irrelevant logic of size"! I used 
to think that if a glass of water were clean as I 
held it to the light, one might drink it with 
safety. I was looking for microbes big enough 
to be seen with the naked eye. Now we know 
that the processes of destruction and repair in 
the human body are effected by minutest or- 
ganisms. It is said that the germ of the dreaded 
infantile paralysis is so small it will pass through 
the pores of a porcelain filter, and was, for years, 
undiscernible under the eye of the most power- 
ful microscope. How, then, shall we dare to 
appraise lightly the value of the lives Israels, 
the Dutch painter, memorialized in his somber 
pictures, and Kipling sings in his verse and cele- 
brates in his fiction? 

" A commonplace life, we say; and we sigh." 

But we need not waste breath in sighing. 
Lincoln's dry jest about God's fondness for 
common people is warranted by the facts. 
Without the Andrews, our trains would stop 



254 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

and our plumbing go unrepaired. You never 
expect Peter — except perhaps during the prog- 
ress of a strike — to run the trolley for you, 
or see that the milk bottle is at your door in 
time for breakfast. Your furnace fire would 
probably go out unless some Andrew were will- 
ing to take the job of looking after it; and there 
would be no newspaper at all, for Andrew sets 
type for it and prints it and flings it in at your 
door. That is the kind of man Andrew is. 
He does the work that Peter feels too impor- 
tant to do. He is "the plain, heroic breed." 

Study him with me. And you will see him in 
four distinct and characteristic attitudes Not 
poses. Andrew does not know how to pose. 
You are more apt to catch him with his coat 
off, and his hair rumpled, and a smudge on his 
nose. So with our first view of Andrew. We 
see him bringing his more distinguished brother 
to Jesus. "He first findeth his own brother 
Simon . . . And he brought him to Jesus." 
The lesser leading the greater; the inconspic- 
uous pushing the other into view. Tell me 
that, apart from Peter, Andrew would never 
have been remembered, and I reply that but 
for Andrew we might never have heard of Peter. 
I suppose you know that in machinery, when 



ANDREW 255 

power is needed, 'tis the small cog pushes the 
big one. When you want speed, you adjust the 
parts so that the big wheel runs the small one; 
but when power is desired, you lock the teeth of 
the small cog into the teeth of the big one and 
start the engine. This is the modus operandi 
of the changeable gears in an auto. You begin 
with "low gear," as the phrase goes, because a 
small cog will transmit more power than a large 
one can. 

And so it is in life. Andrew is the small 
wheel in the machine. He looks very insigni- 
ficant and unimportant beside Peter; but he 
started Peter in the most stupendous business 
of life: "he brought him to Jesus." Who 
shall ever estimate the debt of the Peters to 
the Andrews? In this historic instance I am 
not sure that Peter enjoyed remembering his 
debt; and I sincerely trust that Andrew did 
not too often remind the other of it. The gen- 
uine Andrew never brags. He would rather 
go unthanked than hold out his hands for com- 
pliments. But the service he renders is worth 
wages in the coin of the realm. Cicero pays 
tender tribute to the slave who assisted him 
in his work. But for the sufferings of the 
obscure Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips might never 



256 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

have found his voice for abolition. 'Twas the 
fragile hand of an unnamed teacher in the Con- 
necticut hills that molded the soul of Henry 
Ward Beecher. 

Not the illustrious but the lowly usually 
launch the world's great movements. Some 
day a great vessel is ready to slip from the ways. 
On the deck are notables; perhaps a governor 
or a president. And at the bow stands a 
woman with a bottle of wine for the christen- 
ing. All is ready. But 'tis some humble hand 
below that knocks away the shoring and 
releases the great ship into her element. The 
celebrities on deck, with cheers and waving 
flags, merely go along with the vessel already 
moving. We shall rarely find the case differ- 
ent in life. Our philosophy is wrong when it 
waits for some famous hand to start a reform. 
The chances are ten to one that some uncele- 
brated hand gives the initial push. Andrew 
inspired Peter. A campaign was on to save 
a public institution. We had waited years for 
some conspicuous citizen to take the initiative 
and say, "This is my burden." We said that 
if one such friend could be found, the day was 
saved. And we did not find him. He had 
always copious reasons for not jumping into the 



ANDREW 257 

breach. Meantime a quiet man, with no elo- 
quence but the eloquence of deeds, without 
blazonry or bands, made the cause his own. In 
good report and ill, fronting dismay and check- 
mated by apathy, he held on; and when the in- 
stitution was saved to its ministry, to that 
unostentatious friend more than to all others 
belonged the praise. There always are plenty 
of friends when the band plays success. Nearly 
everybody likes to move with the procession. 
But the real saviour of the hospital is the man 
who was a friend to it while there were few ' 'so 
poor to do it reverence." 

But Andrew's function, at its crest, always 
means one thing: it conducts to Jesus. It 
knows what preeminently the brother needs. 
A hospital is merely a hint of the resourceful- 
ness of God. The wonders of physical surgery 
are more than matched by the surgery of the 
Great Physician. He never errs in diagnosis. 
His hand never falters. He never leaves an 
infected wound. By all means get Peter to 
Jesus. And Andrew is the man to "get" him. 

But our Album furnishes other photographs 
of Andrew. It shows what he was doing when 
destiny knocked at his door. There he is by the 
boat, for all the world — and, apparently, for all 



258 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

his life — a plain fisherman. I do not think 
he was expecting promotion. I am not sure 
that he welcomed it at first. There was so 
much to be done where he lived. Likely he 
had reconciled himself to the boat and the ways 
of the sea, just as we wisely acclimatize ourselves 
to the dust of the shop or the drudgery of the 
household. Then, one day, Jesus passed by 
and called, called a busy man. He rarely calls 
any other kind — successfully. When I was a 
good many years younger than now, and discov- 
ered among my parishioners a couple of people 
with plenty of spare time and money, I re- 
joiced as when one discovers a gold mine. But 
I soon learned that the last man to approach 
for an investment of time is a man who has little 
to do. A churchman with plenty of leisure 
hours rarely can spare any to the church and 
its Lord. Look about you and admit that 
the heaviest loads of the church are being 
borne by those who carry most burdens outside. 
But promotion came to Andrew at his task. 
Promotion seldom visits a man anywhere else 
than at his task. You never catch up with 
real advancement by chasing it. Best stick 
to your last and wait for promotion to smile in 
at your door. The world has a fairly accurate 



ANDREW 259 

way of finding out what we are good for. I 
admit, of course, that it makes mistakes. It 
passes by just as shining examples as you feel 
that you are, to take up with mediocrity, if not 
worse — sometimes, but not usually. Usually 
the world knows where to dispose its promotions. 
And certainly God does. And in my best 
moods I would rather miss, at the hands of my 
fellows, the crown God knows I deserve, than 
to wear one that does not fit. I can distinctly 
recall my anxiety to say farewell to my first 
reader. I was tired of it before I had half fin- 
ished it, tired of its thumbed edges and com- 
monplace words. My fingers itched for the 
second reader. But of what use is the second 
reader until one has mastered the first, whether 
at school or in fife? Promotion is not dropped; 
it is built. "I never look at the clock," said 
Edison. Keep your eyes off the clock, and the 
foreman, and the man at the next bench. Do 
your work as if the world's redemption depended 
upon the kind of work you do. The chances are 
that your industry will be noted and rewarded. 
But in any event, God will come by, and for 
every hour of assiduity of soul, of unwhining 
patience, he will promote you among his fellow- 
workers. 



260 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

But look at Andrew again. He happened to 
be on hand when the throng was to be fed. I 
say "happened"; but he did not "happen": 
Andrew is usually about when he is needed. 
That is one of his strong points. And he 
knows what nobody else seems to know at the 
critical moment. You will recall that when 
Jesus asked his disciples what contribution 
they could make to feeding the multitude, 
Andrew alone had a hopeful answer. He said, 
" There is a lad here which hath five loaves and 
two small fishes." But for Andrew, so far as 
the disciples were concerned, the multitude 
might have gone away hungry. Blessed be 
the Andrews who can name our resources — 
even to the contents of the last basket. 

How often, in the half-forgotten days, we 
used to turn to mother with the query — some- 
times fretful, sometimes joyously sure: "Moth- 
er, where are my skates?" Or, perhaps it was 
our books, or our gloves. And mother usually 
knew. She has a heavenly gift for remembering 
where things are when they are needed. She 
knows just how to put her hand on the sore spot, 
and just what to do. God bless the memory of 
her, and help us to practice her gentle wisdom 
in a world that often loses both its toys and 



ANDREW 261 

its treasures! Said a man concerning his 
clerk: "I could not do business without him. 
He always knows where things are. He re- 
members what I forget." To put such lubri- 
cant on the axles of life may be more important 
than we dream. The world cannot spare Andrew. 
He is in the retail business of helpfulness. 

One other glimpse remains. And it is not 
unlike the first we caught of him. There 
we saw him leading his brother to Jesus; here 
we observe him hurrying to Jesus with the need 
of some strangers. They had asked to "see 
Jesus." Philip told Andrew — that was news; 
Andrew told Jesus — that was evangelism. He 
became a mouthpiece for the needs of others. 
Very likely he did not know what else to do. 
At any rate, he "came, and told Jesus" — al- 
ways a beautiful thing to do. You can, at 
least, tell God how helpless you feel in the sight 
of human need. And who shall guess the high 
use he may make of you? I do not know what 
Jesus told Andrew in answer to the thing Andrew 
told Jesus. But to all eternity Andrew has 
the honor of serving as a voice for the needs 
of others. 



XX 



THE DISCIPLE WHOM JESUS LOVED 
—JOHN 

When the Darwinian theory of human origin 
was first disseminated people gasped. At least 
most people did; certainly, all orthodox church 
folks. The effrontery of it! The sheer con- 
tumely of it! Man descended — or, to speak 
more correctly, ascended — from monkeys, and 
from origins more detestable still! No wonder 
we lost our breath in protestation. And if we 
breathe more comfortably to-day, it is not from 
liking for the theory so much as in stolid accept- 
ance of it, as of the increased price of coal, 
and the need of dodging automobiles, and the 
world war. Seriously, we would rather think 
of ourselves as fallen angels who retain few marks 
of their celestial origin than as developed 
simians by the age-long patience and enterprise 
of God. 

Well, be our preference what it may, I am 
not inclined to disturb it. The evolutionary 
theory has not altogether made good. There 

262 



JOHN 263 

are still missing links in the chain, still flaws in 
the argument. All I am concerned with saying 
is that if the thesis is true, it reveals a bigger 
God. An artist on satin never surprises me as 
does an artist on fustian. Paganini and one 
string thrill me more than Paganini and four 
strings could. Monica, clinging to her dis- 
solute son until she could see him transformed, 
is a greater mother than any who never had 
to break her heart over her boy. I wonder 
if this is part of what Jesus meant when he 
declared "more joy in heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth than over ninety and nine just 
persons who need no repentance." 

Anyhow, the God whom evolution shows me, 
building from least promising material, and 
through unrecorded ages, a Lincoln or a Frances 
Willard, is for me an infinitely more adorable 
God. And the hope he drops into my heart, 
for myself and for my brothers and sisters in 
weakness, is a thousandfold brighter than a 
hope for discrowned angels. God who can 
spatter a hillside with blooms struck from com- 
mon soil; God who can span the glowering 
heavens with a rainbow painted on mist, 
what may he not be expected to do for and with 
the being he has dignified by calling "son"? 



264 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

So: but where does John come in? What 
has the Darwinian theory got to do with John, 
who never heard of it? This: that John, who 
at first was called "Thunderer," and at last the 
"Beloved Disciple," is a striking instance of 
God's way of building his heroes and his saints. 
If John had been "an apostle of sweetness and 
light," at the beginning! But he was nothing 
of the sort. One day a friend of mine, and a 
singularly ripe Christian, showed me a daguer- 
reotype of himself, taken half a century before. 
And as my eyes traveled from the picture to the 
man's benignant face, then back to the pic- 
ture, I fancied I could see, in the pictured face 
of the boy, prophecy of all the rich manhood 
of the friend before me. Perhaps. But so 
doing I was at once reading into the daguerreo- 
type more than was originally there, and read- 
ing out of the heart of humanity its sacredest 
hope. For, as always, there must have been 
present in the picture, had we eyes competent to 
see, threats as well as pledges, looks of the beast 
not less plainly writ than the looks of the angel. 
Boys with faces like that have disappointed 
every eager hope and filled with shame their 
corner of the world; while, on the other hand, 
boys of dark looks and forbidding features have 



JOHN 265 

stumbled on through fire and murk to the mas- 
tery of their souls. And as I searched again 
the eyes of my friend, this is what I saw: I 
saw God making, and remaking, and making 
him again. I saw him coming through flood 
and flame to the Father's house. I saw him 
broken with adversity and torn with grief. 
I saw him yielding to temptation, and anon 
stamping the tempter under foot. In short, 
I saw the boy who might have been any sort 
of man, redeemed, like Jacob of old, to opu- 
lence of manhood. 

And so I think of John, not as necessarily 
lovable, but as potentially detestable, and as 
actually disagreeable. We have fallen in love 
with his latest likeness and hurried past the 
earlier portraits of him, as if his life were all 
admirable. On the contrary, John's afternoon 
beautifully belied the threat of its morning. 
He became more than he promised. As a 
recruit in the army of Jesus he was headstrong, 
pettish, vain. In short, a typical, mother- 
spoiled boy. How do I know? By the Record, 
of course. Recall that moment when his 
mother came, pushing him forward, with his 
brother, for the highest two seats in the King- 
dom. "Grant that these my two sons may sit, 



266 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

the one on thy right hand, and the other on 
the left, in thy kingdom." Just like a mother 
— to claim the best of two worlds for her boys. 
Things we scarcely dared ask for ourselves our 
mothers ask for us in their prayers and their 
dreams, often with their lips. But just there 
lies one road to the spoiling of a boy. His 
mother may ask too much for him; scarcely 
too much of him, but easily and often too much 
for him. 

Most spoiled boys are "mother-spoiled," 
I think. Of course you will hear the calamity 
blamed upon grandmothers. How tenderly I 
remember the cookies in the jar, always, at 
grandmother's, and special viands on the table, 
and a hundred extra liberties dropped out of 
the bigness of grandmother's heart! And the 
ring she gave me. And the mists in her eyes 
as she kissed me away to sleep. They said 
she was like to spoil me — perhaps that is the 
explanation. But, ordinarily, when a boy is 
spoiled 'tis his own mother does the spoiling. 
'Tis she who thinks no garments too good for 
him. 'Tis she who most hotly resents the 
teacher's rod on his back. She who never 
finds a girl quite queenly enough to be his mate. 
She who wonders why neighbors fail to nomi- 



JOHN 267 

nate him for Congress and then make him Presi- 
dent. Nobody else ever dreams and demands 
for him so unselfishly as his mother does. And 
just there is the danger. She does not demand 
enough of him — I mean, consistently. She 
asks what the world is to do for him, not so 
often what he may do for the world. By the 
pain it cost her to get him she is prone to ask 
a path of primroses for him. 

0, I am not exonerating the fathers who are 
too busy to be troubled with the training of a 
boy; who run away from the scene of domestic 
discipline, or whip hard and in anger. No 
doubt there are "/a^er-spoiled boys. All I 
am saying is that no other can so expeditiously 
and effectually spoil a boy as can she who has 
paid the lion's share of the price of raising him. 
Not Zebedee, the father, who doubtless was 
proud of John, but Salome, the mother, who 
loved him more than she loved her own life, 
made it hard for John to learn the way of his 
Lord. So we see him, entering the race for im- 
mortal honors, handicapped by his advantages. 

Shall I specify certain traits which John had 
to outgrow? (No man can be spoiled by any- 
body else, apart from his personal connivance 
and cooperation.) Hear him calling down fire 



268 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

to destroy a certain village which had given 
him the cold shoulder. A pretty piece of 
gospel ministry — to burn up a town for its 
inhospitality ! It sounds like David in one 
of his imprecatory psalms, or the Kaiser sum- 
moning all angels and archangels to help him 
punish Belgium for being in his path. 'Tis 
the mark of the zealot with more heat than 
heart. 'Tis the mood of the undisciplined boy 
accustomed to have his own way. It is usually 
so much easier to destroy a town than to con- 
vert it, to kill than to redeem. Few of us can 
brook opposition. We may not believe in 
the "divine right" of kings, but we firmly 
believe in the divine right of having our own 
way. "I'll teach you," rages a father at his 
child. Teach what? Why, chiefly this: that 
it is not safe to interfere with father. This 
is what Germany has been teaching Servia and 
Roumania. It is what the zealot is always 
in peril of attempting to teach: the rule of the 
big head, not the big heart. Nor shall we find 
any lasting peace, either in industry or as be- 
tween nations, so long as might makes right. 
Said Lincoln once, "I am not in favor of crush- 
ing anybody" There speaks the spirit of Him 
who, in rebuke of John's destructive ardor, 



JOHN 269 

declared: "The Son of man is not come to de- 
stroy men's lives, but to save them." 0, if 
John had been the last disciple to need that 
warning ! 

But look at him again. John was the sort of 
man who would shout his denominational name 
as a defiance to the world. One day he came 
to Jesus with a report of personal prowess 
which he was sure would make his Lord's eyes 
kindle. "Master, we saw one casting out 
devils in thy name, . . . and we forbade him, 
because he folio weth not with us." How mod- 
ern it sounds! How we love to draw the line 
at our own fences! How quick we are to pro- 
claim the Methodist way, or the Baptist way, 
or Billy Sunday's way as the only approved 
way. We set more store by shibboleths than 
by the bigness of the Father's heart. We 
work harder for a sectarian triumph than for 
a victory of Jesus Christ. We cannot see the 
brother in the man who answers roll call in a 
different regiment. Do you recall the reply 
of our Lord? — "He that is .not against us is 
on our part"? Most of us like the contrasting 
word better: "He that is not for us is against 
us." You will hear it a thousand times to the 
other, once. It suits our petty rivalries and 



270 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

provincialisms. Mostly, it is a word for small 
souls. But, some day, we shall claim the 
majesty of the truth Jesus announced to John : 
"He that is not against us is on our part." 

The business of redeeming the world is "big 
business." It cannot be done by competition. 
In a profounder sense than any with which 
modern industry has invested the phrase we 
must "get together." I mean we must find 
out who our friends are. And, O, the surprise 
of discovering how numerous they are! Sup- 
pose the "Entente Allies" had stood apart, 
each recalling fervently her own grievances, 
each critical of the other's uniform and tactics, 
each fearful lest the others should win a pre- 
ponderance of glory. Well, for one thing, the 
war would have ended long ago on Germany's 
terms. And the cause of democracy would be 
as dead as the victims of the Lusitania crime. 
We have a bigger contest on hand than the 
world war. It is the campaign for the redemp- 
tion of earth from greed and shame. And we 
need every ounce of powder to use on the foe. 
No time to call names; no time to be small. 
Just time to count an ally wherever a fellow 
man is trying, in whatever -earnest fashion, 
to "brighten his corner." God has on earth 



JOHN 271 

more friends than are enumerated in our 
census tables. Pity that we should fail to 
find out who they are. O John, John, if you 
cannot learn that lesson, get to the rear, and 
leave your place for a man who can discover 
confederates where you see only foes! "If 
thine heart is as my heart, give me thine 
hand." 

But John had yet another streak of callow- 
ness to outgrow. I have referred to the time 
his mother asked a chief seat for him in the 
coming Kingdom. (God bless and forgive the 
fond mothers!) But the Record indicates 
that John asked the same thing for himself. 
How we love the chief seats and the shoulder- 
straps and the applause of the crowd! There 
come back to me, with singular vividness, the 
days I played soldier, on old Calvert Street, 
in my boyhood. O, the struttings, and the 
shouted commands — and the wooden swords! 
And the boy who must always be captain! He 
would not play unless he could be captain. I 
am not telling which boy it was; I do not 
need to. But the boy grew up, and still de- 
mands to be captain. Without an officer's 
commission he will not serve, though God needs 
so many "high privates." Do you know him? 



272 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Are you he? Must you be chairman of the 
committee? Is it the cause you are working 
for, or your name in the paper? Have you 
ever cultivated the grace of anonymity? Re- 
member, then, the reply that John got from 
Jesus: "Ye know that the princes of the Gen- 
tiles exercise dominion over them. . . . But 
it shall not be so among you : but whosoever will 
be great among you, let him be your minister; 
and whosoever will be chief among you, let 
him be your servant: even as the Son of man 
came not to be ministered unto, but to min- 
ister." 

What a world this would be if our rivalries 
were rivalries in service! If we got up in the 
morning to get ahead of somebody else in 
unselfishness! If we went downtown to find 
ways, not to wring the world into our cup but 
to wring ourselves lavishly into the cup of 
redemption! If we came to church, eager to 
give a stranger the best seat instead of making 
him feel like a pickpocket for happening to be 
shown to our usual place! If we thought of 
Jesus Christ as commanding our revenue and 
our time and our strength for the extension of 
the Kingdom of brotherhood! What a world 
it would be 9 so different from the world it is 



JOHN 273 

with our self-seeking left in it! And you smile — 
indulgently, of course; you have heard the 
same thing so many times, and tried it so sel- 
dom. 0, men, I am not declaring an absurd 
Utopianism; I am declaring the gospel which 
some day we shall use. 

But John. I am glad I do not need to leave 
with you the likeness I have just been showing, 
as the only likeness of John. One of the tra- 
ditions portrays him in extreme old age, led 
before a great concourse of Christians, and held 
erect long enough to spread out his thin, white 
hands in benediction, while his lips murmured, 
"Little children, love one another." And the 
audience shook with sobs, as if, indeed, it were 
composed of little children. But I do not need 
to depend upon tradition to give us such a 
glimpse of the man whom Christ remade. He 
wrote a whole Gospel without mentioning the 
name of the author. And not once in the book 
does he refer to himself by name. We see him 
with his head on our Lord's shoulder, unnamed 
save as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." 
Again we catch sight of him under the shadow 
of the cross, receiving from his Master the 
sacred charge of his mother, still unnamed. 
Again we see him running with Peter to the 



274 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

sepulcher, on Easter morning, still unnamed. 
And yet again we behold him by the sea, after 
Peter's beautiful confession, unnamed still. 

Not the John who would call down fire to con- 
sume a village; not the sectarian John; not 
the place-hunting John, but John remade on a 
bigger scale, and with a new master- word. 
Love — love — love! You cannot quarrel with 
that. You cannot defeat it. You never can 
kill it. I do not know when the change came 
to John, or how. Suddenly or gradually, I do 
not know. But I see him changed, so changed 
that his letters drip the honey of the heart. 
"If a man love not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not 
seen?" — that is fair sample of the soul of the 
new John. And the new John is the greater 
John: more of a man. 'Tis your small man 
who quarrels; the great heart has no time. 
Moreover, he has learned the better way. This 
is Lent: time to re-begin. And the only way 
to re-begin is with a new word and a new 
Master: or, an old word, reborn, and an old 
Master recrowned and supreme. 



XXI 

A NIGHT VISITOR— NICODEMUS 

"Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark.'* 

Yes, and after that, Nicodemus. As the 
Record expressly says, "Nicodemus . . . came 
to Jesus by night." Why "by night" the 
Record fails to state. And in absence of ex- 
plicit information on the point, tradition has 
lodged a serious complaint against the man. 
The common assumption is that Nicodemus came 
at night because he was ashamed to come at 
all. Perhaps he was. Sometimes men blush 
over the things that ought to make them most 
proud: as a growing boy goes crimson when 
his mother kisses him in public, or a Christian 
scrambles from his knees when you catch him 
at his prayers. Perhaps Nicodemus was afraid 
of being caught knocking at Jesus's door; 
hence he came "by night." 

But why make any such unflattering assump- 
tion? As concerning a certain "explanation," 

it is seldom true that it is the only explanation. 
275 



276 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

It may be the only handy one, or the only one 
we wish to accept. But there are few situations 
incapable of at least two explanations. Once I 
missed a sum of money. Obviously, many are 
the doors through which money may disap- 
pear. But, eventually, I closed all doors but 
one; reduced to one the number of plausible 
explanations, even though I smirched thereby 
another's reputation. I was wrong; there 
were a half dozen possible explanations. Why 
should I select the least complimentary as the 
true? Why should we ever do it? What an 
altered world this would be if we gave others 
the benefit of the doubt ! 

Because Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, 
it by no means follows that he was ashamed 
of his errand. It may be that he was in a 
hurry. Some issues cannot wait for settlement 
by daylight. Some questions must be answered 
at once, while the heart almost stops beating. 
Some ventures must be made like leaps in the 
dark. Night is not always a cloak; it may 
be revealer. It tells how eager and spent we 
are. But for the fallen shadows we might 
have missed sight of the real Nicodemus. He 
"came to Jesus by night." 

Or perchance he chose the night for its ten- 



NICODEMUS 277 

der, beautiful intimacy. Have you watched 
a flock of birds gather at nightfall? I do not 
mean that they choose the dark, but that the 
dark impels them to proximity. And what 
our feathered friends do by instinct we may do 
deliberately, choosing for intimate searching 
of soul the time of shadow and stars. It is not 
safe to make a generalization of what Jesus 
said to Nicodemus: that "men love darkness 
better than light because their deeds are evil." 
Men sometimes love it for that black reason. 
But sometimes they love it for the dearest and 
deepest reasons. What one of us, with a great 
grief or a great joy, has not longed for night 
to fall and shut him in with his precious secret? 
The world seems smaller at night. One can 
think aloud without shame. He can say 
things to his own soul and to the soul of his 
friend, things he cannot say so frankly by day. 
Day is, in some respects, garish and brazen. 
Night invites intimacy; helps one show what 
he is. 'Tis the time of the opened heavens 
and the uplifted ladder and the descending 
angels. 

So I can understand the choice of night by 
this ancient visitor for his interview with 
Jesus. He came when he could say most and 



278 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

hear most. At any rate, whatever his motive, 
you see him at Jesus' s door, and a moment later, 
face to face with our Lord. No preliminaries 
of introduction, no description of dress or pose, 
such as modern reporters furnish us of famous 
interviews. Just a meeting of Master and 
man face to face. For I moment I should like 
you to forget that anything was said. Talk is 
very unimportant sometimes. Enough that 
a man stands face to face with Jesus Christ — 
suppliant, questioner, penitent, or what you 
will; but face to face. No man ever goes from 
that experience the same as he came to it. The 
later history of Nicodemus, beautiful in sug- 
gestion, shows the consequences of the night 
meeting in which he stood face to face with Jesus 
Christ. A good many years ago there died 
a woman, a colored "mammy" as I recall, 
for whom it was claimed that she had seen 
George Washington. It was her only distinc- 
tion. Otherwise she was ignorant and withered 
and poor. But if what she claimed was true, 
we with our pictures of Washington, and our 
sketches of his life, and our rhetorical estimates 
of his service to humanity, were jealous of her. 
Hers a privilege accorded to none of us; and 
she the last to claim what no other could ever 



NICODEMUS 279 

claim — a sight of the man. She had been in his 
presence. She had heard the tone of his voice, 
seen the fire in his eyes. Nothing else ever 
takes the place of face-to-face contact. Dream 
all we may, romance as we will, visualize in 
our heart a friend or lover, nothing else satis- 
fies as a look does, or a touch. Sit with his 
photograph in your hand, or his last letter 
spread out before you, or under the shadow of 
some stately memorial of him. Then let him 
appear in the flesh, and how swiftly all the re- 
membrances slip into desuetude! He is so much 
more than any report or representation of him. 

Just so with Jesus Christ. The only ade- 
quate thing to say about Jesus is an invitation 
to come to him. The only sufficient thing to 
do for your friend is to bring him to Jesus. Have 
you noticed how much is made, in the Gospels, 
of the presence of Jesus? He was always getting 
next to people. People saw him and felt him. 
He laid his hands upon them and whispered 
things into their souls. The bread which fed 
the multitude on the hillside had been through 
his fingers. The clay on the blind man's eyes 
was mixed by him. Personal contact! You 
never can dispense with or substitute for that. 
The most delicate part of an automobile engine 



280 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

is the distributor in which the electric fluid is 
fed, through various contact-points, to the 
cylinders. The contact points must be clean 
and precise, or the entire mechanism stands 
helpless. Men must touch Jesus Christ. Ru- 
mors about him, historic glimpses of him, testi- 
monies to him, never suffice. We must get to 
him. "Back to Christ" means more than 
going back to his way; it means going back to 
his presence — where one can feel him and see 
him. This Nicodemus did. He "came to 
Jesus." Hobbled with prejudice perhaps, 
tongue-tied by convention, bursting with self- 
importance and information, he came. You 
see him coming', you see him there. Everything 
else was secondary and relative. He came. 

But as he stands there we shall have oppor- 
tunity to study him, especially while he is fix- 
ing his mouth for the special things he came 
to say. As matter of fact, we have not the 
faintest idea what Nicodemus came to say. 
He never got to the point. Before he had 
gotten safely past the compliments with which 
he opened his case, Jesus broke in with one of 
his searching words. In a way I can appreciate 
Nicodemus's feelings. Once I was preparing 
to ask a man a favor. I did not want to take 



NICODEMUS 281 

his breath by blurting out my request. So I 
attempted to entertain him politely with pleas- 
antries and compliments, to warm the soil of 
his heart for my seed. I was doing fairly well 
— under the circumstances — when suddenly 
his face broke into a quizzical smile and facing 
me squarely, he said, "Come on, old fellow, 
how much do you want?" Never mind the 
sum; I got it. And so far I have the advantage 
of Nicodemus, who never was even asked 
what he came for. Yet I do not think that Nico- 
demus minded, he took away in his soul so 
much more than he expected to carry. 

'Tis a beautiful way God has. You scratch 
the soil and drop in a kernel of corn. And God 
gives you a whole stalk loaded with ears of 
corn. His mother dropped a word of praise 
into the soul of Benjamin West, and God gave 
her a famous artist for her son. Columbus 
started for the East Indies, the which, had he 
found, sailing westward, would have amply re- 
paid him. But God gave him the glory of open- 
ing a new continent. That is the way of God. 
Somebody says he "cannot admire a petty, 
bookkeeping God." Who asked him to admire 
that kind of God? That is not the kind of 
God our God is. He gives "beauty for ashes, 



s 



282 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

and the garment of praise for the spirit of heavi- 
ness." And sometimes we get most from God 
when he gives no part of what we ask for; 
as Nicodemus did, on his memorable night 
visit to Jesus long ago. 

But the man himself. Study him as he 
stands face to face with our Lord and see what 
manner of man he is. First, and obviously, 
a man of marked seriousness. No levity, no 
quibbling — just a plain, blood-warm gravity. 
Life for him was not a holiday, but a business 
day for the soul. He took everything seriously: 
his education, his traditions, his membership 
in the Sanhedrin, his religion. So earnest was 
he that he grew hot when he thought Jesus was 
making sport of him. He was in no mood for 
play that night, if ever. And I think of him 
as representative of an increasing number of 
men. "Tis a serious — almost a solemn — age, 
ours. I know we loudly laugh. The stage is 
given over to comedy. More humorous books 
are written than ever before. And there is 
the comic page of the daily paper. But the 
laughter of the age is a sort of pathetic reaction 
from its tears. Grimaldi, the famous comedian, 
said that he made his audiences roar with mer- 
riment while his own heart was in the valley 



NICODEMUS 283 

of sorrow. I wonder if he realized that some 
of those who laugh loudest in the audiences are 
as sad as he. I believe that is one reason for 
the decadence of serious plays — life is so se- 
rious outside the theater. As I have heard 
earnest men confess, "When I go to the theater, 
I want to laugh." 

With the lifting of its ideals, life has grown 
more weighty. You cannot answer, affirm- 
atively, Cain's mocking question, and not fall 
serious. To be "my brother's keeper" is 
solemn business, whether he be my employee 
in the shop, or my neighbor in want or in prison, 
or my brother across the sea. The world's 
miseries hurt us worse than they hurt our 
grandfathers. Its injustices shame us as men 
before were never ashamed. Its ignorance 
and wantonness set us sad. Religion means 
and includes more things than it used to. It 
has broken out of church and Sunday into the 
weekdays and the street. "I grow more se- 
rious every day," said the author of Sartor 
Resartus. And the "playfulness of that little 
book is really the foam on the wave of Car- 
lyle's indignation. We are serious enough, 
God knows; too serious sometimes to indulge 
the grace of smiles — more's the pity. 



284 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

The trouble is that we do not bring our se- 
riousness to Jesus, as Nicodemus did. We take 
it to the movies, or to the mountains, or to 
our friends, when we ought to take it to Jesus. 
One reason for the phenomenal growth of Chris- 
tian Science is that it seems to give back to peo- 
ple the right to smile. It assures us that pain 
is not real, and hunger need not be, and death 
is merely error of mortal mind. In other words, 
it disposes of the problem not by solving but by 
denying it. Instead of inviting us to bring 
our sorrows to Jesus, it tells us that there is 
no sorrow to bring. Everything is good, once 
we call it so. I wonder what Nicodemus would 
have said to such airy philosophy. He that 
was so eager to be a good man, how would he 
have regarded Jesus if Jesus had told him 
there was nothing to improve — except his phil- 
osophy? 

And what did Jesus say to this serious night 
visitant? Jesus told him that the world's 
method of improving men was not searching 
enough, not inward enough. It was a method 
of putty and paint when what they needed was 
a new house. "Ye must be born from above." 
That is, if we want a new kind of crop, we 
must plant a new kind of seed. Man needs, 



NICODEMUS 285 

not a better exterior, but a different heart. y 
The "new heaven and new earth wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness" will be new, not patched up. 
Smiles and songs will come back by redemp- 
tion. If you ever bring your serious self to 
Jesus Christ, he will say just such things to 
you. Confessed Martin Luther once: "You 
must take men as they are; you cannot alter 
human nature." O, can't you? I have seen 
it altered. Or, if you please, I have seen its 
better side turned to the light. I have seen 
cruel men turn gentle, and drunkards sober, 
and unclean men chaste. In short, I have seen 
men and women made over in the likeness of 
Jesus. What particular figure of speech you 
use to describe the process I do not care. Call 
it the new birth, or conversion, or shift of 
psychic center, or what you will. All that con- 
cerns me is the fact, and that Jesus can accom- 
plish it. Nicodemus seems to have had a hard 
time getting down to the fact, but I feel sure 
he arrived. Have you? Have you tried every- 
one but Jesus? Why not try him? 

But Nicodemus was not only serious; he 
was brave. He was brave to come to Jesus 
at all, braver than some of us are. Then see 
him in the Sanhedrin when Jesus was being 



286 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

tried. Every other voice was against him — 
all save Nicodemus's voice. But, like a man, 
Nicodemus lifted hot protest against his fellow- 
judges' treatment of our Lord: "Doth our 
law judge any man before it hear him, and 
know what he doeth?" Granted that it was 
merely a decent, judicial thing to say, still it 
was more than any other of the judges dared to 
say. And I like him for it. I like any man 
who, against the tide of suspicion and perse- 
cution, stands up for his friend. I like a man 
to grow hot for the good name and human 
rights of his friend. And when the good name 
is swept away, I like a man who still stands 
up and declares himself "friend." That is one 
of the things a friend is for. 

I shall not soon forget the look in the eyes 
of an old schoolmate as he stood in the vesti- 
bule of my church, after years of silence, so 
changed I scarcely recognized him — shabby, 
broken, vagabond — and asked if I was friend 
enough to be friend to him then. Ah, but when 
Jesus Christ is the Man who expects us to stand 
up for him, think of the perfidy of falling down. 
Peter knew the bitterness of that. No wonder 
that when he caught the reproaching look in 
his Master's eyes he "went out and wept bit- 



NICODEMUS 287 

terly." But Peter has, at least, this advantage 
over us: he promised to stand up for his Lord, 
whereas some of us have not even promised 
to be loyal. Jesus needs friends to-day. He 
never has had enough. Admirers and well- 
wishers and secret disciples, but not enough 
friends. 

One other look at Nicodemus. See him 
coming with a hundred pounds of burial spices, 
to our Lord's dear body. A hundred pounds ! 
More than was required for the tender pur- 
pose, more than could be used. Ah, there 
speaks the heart of Nicodemus. It reminds 
me of the spikenard gift of Mary; a piece of 
extravagance of love. Some gifts cannot be 
justified by the head, I do not think that 
Nicodemus cared who saw him come now. 
Something had broken loose in his heart. Was 
he trying to atone, with burial spices, for some 
lack of loyalty while Jesus was alive — as we 
pile caskets with flowers in remembrance of the 
unkind things we are sorry we said? Or had 
he a faith so vital that it bridged for him the 
chasm of that dreadful day? I do not know. 
But I see him come, head bowed, not with 
shame but with grief, bringing his lavish, 
lovely gift. 



288 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

In a way, it was too late — as recompense. 
But the fragrance of those aromatic spices 
reaches us. It was the most he could do — 
the best he could do. It confessed his heart. 
And if that were all he ever did, we, realizing 
the fate of bodies on which the law had wrought 
its vengeance, never can be grateful enough. 
The night visitor has come out into the day. 



XXII 

WHEN THE HEAVENS OPENED 
—STEPHEN 

One of my seminary preceptors used to tell 
us, with a sly twinkle in his eye, that when a ser- 
mon seemed to drag for want of ideas to propel 
it, we could always "scare up the martyrs." 
I cannot recall that I ever followed the pre- 
scription — perhaps because I took it as warn- 
ing rather than consolation. But, of course, 
there are tricks in the preacher's trade, as in 
all others, and many the shift to conceal a dearth 
of ideas, or to overcome the stale air of a 
church building, or to .keep the audience awake. 
One recalls the bantering reply of Beecher to 
a young preacher who had been sweating blood 
in the pulpit while Beecher occupied a place in 
the pew. The young man had been expe- 
riencing what we call a "hard time," and knew 
it. And he was especially chagrined to labor 
thus in Beecher 's presence. Finally, after 
his ordeal was over, he grasped the great 
preacher's hand, and said in a burst of unnec- 

289 



290 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

essary confidence, "Mr. Beecher, do you ever 
have a hard time, preaching?" 

"O, yes," said Beecher. 

"And what do you do under such circum- 
stances?" 

"O," replied Mr. Beecher, "I yell and pound 
just as you did." 

But speaking of martyrs, particularly of 
"scaring them up" to hide the vacant spots in 
a sermon. I repeat that, so far as I can recall, 
I have never resorted to that favorite means 
of bluffing an audience. Perhaps, chiefly, 
because it did not seem fair to the martyrs. 
Like using "Caesar's dust to stuff a rubbish 
hole." Martyrdom is solemn business for 
the man or woman who suffers it. It is one's 
utmost witness to the deepest truth of his life 
or hers. We cannot afford to use the word 
even carelessly. Apropos of the death of the 
house surgeon of a certain hospital, as result 
of performing an autopsy, one of the newspapers 
headlined the tragedy thus: "Young Surgeon 
Dies, Martyr." It may be that the editor had it 
right. There is a deal of unadvertised "mar- 
tyrdom" among the members of the medical 
profession, not to say among their patients. 
But death under harrowing circumstances does 



STEPHEN 291 

not constitute martyrdom. Anarchists still 
refer to the legally hanged Chicago "reds" 
as "martyrs." Some of his friends described 
Lieutenant Becker as a "martyr" to the injus- 
tice of the courts and the implacability of Gover- 
nor Whitman. And we frequently speak of 
"martyrs" to overwork, and "martyrs" to 
overstudy, and "martyrs" to too much moth- 
er-in-law. 

All of which is a gross misuse of language. 
A martyr is a witness — voluntary, convinced, 
unafraid. His martyrdom is his supreme testi- 
mony to the deepest thing of his soul. Accept- 
ance of suffering is one thing; acceptance of 
it as a witness is another and vastly different 
thing. On a folder used so effectively during 
a hospital campaign was the face of a laddie 
marked with pain and for death. They say 
that the boy's face, thus pictured, yielded thou- 
sands of dollars to the fund. But piteous as 
the face was, it was not the face of a martyr. 
I mean that such suffering is not necessarily 
martyrdom. It is the fashion to speak of our 
three assassinated Presidents as "martyr-Pres- 
idents." But I do not think that Guiteau's 
bullet made Garfield a martyr; nor did Czol- 
gosz's bullet at Buffalo make McKinley one. 



292 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

I am not sure about Lincoln even. Gaunt, 
stalwart, sacrificial soul, endowed with all the 
fiber of a man, and all the feeling of a woman, 
I think he would have been slow to admit him- 
self to a page in the "Book of Martyrs." Only 
God knows who the martyrs are, for he alone 
knows the "set of the soul." There have been 
those who said that Lincoln exposed himself 
unnecessarily when he went to Ford's Theater 
on that fateful night. I do not know. Mar- 
tyrdom is a witnessing. 'Twas not John Wilkes 
Booth's bullet made Lincoln a martyr; 'twas 
the steady, solemn "set of his soul" to the high- 
est truth he knew. 

So with Stephen, usually described as the 
"first Christian martyr." 'Twas not the fierce 
hail of stones upon his head made him that, 
anymore than a railway accident, or the tubercle- 
bacillus makes its victim a martyr. Stephen's 
own soul made him that, if at all. He must 
crown himself. When the Czar of all the 
Russias was crowned, himself must do the 
crowning. Not as in England, was the regal 
emblem set upon his head by the hand of an- 
other. For, according to Russian usage, none 
but the Czar himself was imperial enough to 
set the crown where it belongs. Others might 



STEPHEN 293 

bring it to him, but he must take the crown into 
his own hands and invest himself with it. So in 
life itself. Not even God can crown us with 
love or holiness or truth or martyrdom. In 
the democracy of the kingdom of Jesus every 
man is a sovereign; he must crown himself. 

But if we may not classify Stephen, we may 
at least study him. And we shall see him, first, 
as a man with a ministering hand. He, with 
six others, was ordained to kindness, a thing 
of which this world has never had enough. 
We have had wars enough, without this latest 
and most frightful of them all. There has been 
disputation enough, and theology enough, and 
wealth enough, I suppose (could it be equitably 
distributed), but never enough kindness. And 
Christianity means that more than anything else. 
Jesus gave men surprisingly little new dogma. 
It has been said that he taught not a single new 
truth. The idea of brotherhood was not new 
with Jesus, but the world had scant notion 
what a real brother of men could be until Jesus 
showed us, by kindness. And not even yet 
have we found the hardihood to try his method 
consistently upon the world. If the author 
of a familiar couplet will permit me, I'd like 
to change one word: 



294 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

"'Tis love of which our nerves are scant: 
'Tis love, more love, for which we pant." 

Our world has never had enough loving, or it 
might, by now, be bound by golden chains 
about the feet of God. 

We have so many misgivings as to the effi- 
cacy of love. Artemus Ward, whose humor 
made our grandsires hold their sides, said once: 
"Love conquereth all things: I once tried it 
on a mule." He left it to be inferred that one 
such trial ought to suffice. Mules, at least, 
are an exception. But I am not sure, as 
against mules, even. I have seen beating tried, 
with most dismal results. I have seen kicking 
tried, with nothing better to show. I have 
heard profanity tried, and the mule did not seem 
to understand that. And then I have seen a 
wisp of grass, or a bit of sugar accomplish what 
all other means had failed to accomplish. There 
are human mules doubtless: pachydermous, 
constitutionally stubborn and perverse. A first 
application of kindness is wasted, apparently. 
There are boys who resist your pains, and neigh- 
bors who fight back pity, and wantons who do not 
wish to be redeemed. So? Well, if we must 
fail in our enterprise of redemption, let us 
have the honor of failing in the practice of 



STEPHEN 295 

the only principle that even harbingers redemp- 
tion. 

One tells of visiting an old English prison. 
"Who's that?" asks the visitor, pointing to a 
huge, hulking figure, hobbled with ball and 
chain, and with a hideous wound, part healed, 
upon his cheek. "He's the worst of the gang," 
snarled the keeper, and the prisoner showed his 
teeth, like a dog at bay. But the visitor 
paused, touched with gentle sympathy the 
unhealed wound, and said, "I'm sorry." A 
few eager sentences followed, and the keeper 
shouted, "Time's up." Some fifteen years 
wore away, and the same visitor saw the same 
prisoner in a Canadian prison squad. "It's a 
'lifer,'" said the keeper, "the best in the gang." 
Just then the convict caught sight of the man 
who once touched his cheek: "O, I've tried 
so hard to be good," he said, while his great 
frame shook. That is the miracle of love — the 
wage of the ministrant man. 

But we have almost lost sight of Stephen. 
His office was not the redemption of convicts, 
but the care of the defenseless and weak. He 
was elected a deacon, for practical ministry 
among the wards of the early church. For you 
must know that the apostolic church admitted 



296 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

an obligation which has sometimes been lost 
sight of, an obligation concerning the bodies 
as well as the souls of its members. It is said 
that one of the popes — I have forgotten which 
— forbade himself, for several days, to say mass, 
because a beggar had died of starvation in the 
streets of Rome. He felt himself personally 
guilty, before God, that such a tragedy could 
occur in a Christian community over which 
he was head. Had there been more popes like 
him, we might be more complacent in the pres- 
ence of papal claims. That is a true vice- 
gerency of Christ which holds itself liable for 
unnecessary hardship. Poverty need not be. 
Poverty will not be, once we admit the full obli- 
gation of Christianity. There is no valid 
reason, in heaven or on earth, for children of a 
city going supperless to bed. "Poverty is 
no crime," perhaps, so far as the pauper is con- 
cerned. But poverty is a crime so far as it 
represents the apathy or ethical blindness of 
the church. All this business of wages, of 
housing, of sanitation is our business as Chris- 
tians if we really are about our Father 9 s business. 
It is not a substitute for the religion of faith; 
it is the logic of the religion of faith. It is writ 
deep and indelible in our original Charter. Paul 



STEPHEN 297 

came down from his loftiest doctrinal discus- 
sion to talk about the "collection." Jesus 
made sure that none of his audience on the hill- 
side listened with empty stomach. Blessed 
be Stephen, the man of the loaves! 

Ah, but there is more to be said about Ste- 
phen. He had a shining face. So the Record 
expressly states: "And all that sat in the coun- 
cil, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as 
it had been the face of an angel." Little knowl- 
edge, perhaps, had they of the aspect of an- 
gels. But let that pass; we are quite as much 
in the dark when we use the phrase. Suffice 
that they were trying to describe a light that 
never was on land or sea, except in a human 
face, and that this is not the panegyric of his 
friends, but the tribute of his foes. The light 
that shines in a face — I wonder if this was what 
the old masters were trying to show when they 
painted, with aureoles or nimbuses around them, 
the faces of the saints? They could not actually 
paint the light of goodness in the face, any more 
than I can describe it, so they called attention 
to the fact that the light had been there, in the 
faces portrayed. 

Into the face of George Whitefield as he 
preached there flashed a luminance which you 



298 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

shall find in none of the pictures of him. Of 
course not. Easier to catch and prison the 
flash of a star, a thing which modern photogra- 
phy has done. But no hypersensitized film, 
no incredibly rapid shutter will ever reproduce 
the look I am thinking of. I have seen it in 
the eyes of a mother with a babe in her arms. 
I have seen it in the almost heavenly smile of 
lover or friend. I have seen it in the face of a 
sufferer who had glimpsed God. I have seen 
it glorifying the plain features of a penitent at 
the altar, or of a Christian making a supreme 
renunciation for the sake of his soul. I have 
seen it; but I can no more describe it to you than 
I can describe a rose or a caress or a sunset. 
Not so well. But you know perfectly well 
what I am talking about, though you never will 
see it when you look at yourself in the mirror. I 
mean that no man can see it in his own face. 
"Moses wist not that . . . his face shone." 
Knowledge, on his part, of the light would have 
extinguished it. Nobody can see in his own 
face the shining which others behold there. 
But to live so as to yield that shining, is the 
greatest thing in the world. 

Mind, I am not saying that the shining face 
is the greatest thing in the world. To live 



STEPHEN 299 

for the sake of the light in the face is only a rare- 
fied desire to be pretty, a matter of undue 
attention to spiritual cosmetics. Nor comes 
the shining that way. Go to your work not its 
slave but its master. Accept your thorn, not 
because you must but because you choose. Take 
up your cross not as victim but as redeemer. 
"Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things 
are honest, whatsoever things are just, what- 
soever things are pure, whatsoever things are 
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; 
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." And as sure as God 
the light will break out in your face. Stephen's 
face told the kind of man he was. So does 
yours. Every man is not only the architect 
of his own fortune; he is the lighter of the 
lamps in his own face. 

But there is yet more to be said about Ste- 
phen. He told his story without flinching, and 
he finished it with Jesus Christ. Evidently* 
he knew that his auditors did not wish to hear 
what he was going to say. And if that were 
the best reason he had for saying it, what he 
said was not worth saying — under the circum- 
stances. God forgive some people the hate- 
ful things they say. Have you the acquaint- 



300 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ance of an exasperating child who, if he can 
discover what you wish he would not do, 
devotes himself to the doing of that? If 'tis a 
special book you desire him to let alone, no 
others are worth touching. If you ask him to 
keep away from the piano, he is seized with 
musical tastes. I have met that same boy, 
grown up, and propensed the same way. The 
thing you least want to hear is the thing he 
seems determined to say. O, beware. Do 
not say a thing merely because it is true. Do 
not say it chiefly to get it off your conscience; 
better leave it on your conscience unless you 
are likely to bless the other man by getting it 
off. And, for that matter, what some people 
mistakenly call "conscience" is spleen. If 
the speech you feel moved to make will be 
disagreeable to hear, think twice before you 
make it. Spiritual surgery is delicate business. 
Attempt it not until you are a graduate in the 
craft. 

Seriously, I am disappointed in Stephen's 
famous sermon. I can easily understand why 
it cost him his life. It made his auditors angry, 
and there is no virtue in making people angry 
merely; no religion in hurting their feelings. 
Our call is not to vivisection, but to make 



STEPHEN 301 

people want to be good. Perhaps not all of 
the sermon was reported. Perhaps he was 
not permitted to finish what he started to say. 
Anyhow, my business is perfectly plain. It is 
to put you in love with Jesus Christ. If you 
do not fall in love with him, the fault must be 
chiefly mine. For he is the sort of Friend you 
can hardly help falling in love with, once you 
see him. I do not need to prove that harmony 
is better than discord; all I do is to let you hear 
the difference. I need not explain the beauty 
of the rainbow; I need only call attention to 
that arc of glory next time God sets it in the 
sky. I need not tell how adorable Jesus is; 
let me show him to you. 

But Stephen atoned for his poor sermon, if 
such it was, by the spirit he showed at the last. 
The Christ whom I can with difficulty find in 
his sermon is splendidly manifest in the closing 
scene of Stephen's life. For as the stones 
rained upon him, beating out his life, somehow 
they wrung out also the inner sweetness of his 
soul. "And he kneeled down, and cried with 
a loud voice, 'Lord, lay not this sin to their 
charge.'" Beautiful antiphonal to the prayer 
of his Lord: "Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do." Just a swift golden 



302 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

flare of the forgiving spirit that would burn up 
even the memory of its own hurt! "Lord, lay 
not this sin to their charge. And when he said 
this, he fell asleep." What a way to fall asleep 
— forgiving all! 



XXIII 

ON THE DAMASCUS ROAD— PAUL 

One of my youthful friends asked me recently 
if I believed that the Lord's prayer could be 
engraved on a pin-head. He had heard of the 
thing, as exhibited at a certain bazaar, at ten 
cents per look. But he did not believe it; nor 
would he believe the testimony of his own eyes 
had he been permitted to look. Would I? No, 
I wouldn't — any more than I should believe 
that an oar is bent when it appears so in the 
water. Part of the pain of growing up is in 
the admission that "seeing is (not) believing." 
One recalls the classical instance of the farmer 
viewing for the first time a giraffe. He looked 
the animal over; first curiously, later incredu- 
lously, and finally with scorn. "There ain't 
no such animal," he commented in disgust, as 
he turned away. So the lad and I agreed that 
no such microscopic marvel as the Lord's 
Prayer engraved on a pin-head ever was 
wrought. The thing couldn't be done — which 

put an end to the argument. 
303 



304 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

But, laddie, I am about to attempt a more 
impossible feat than that. I am to photograph 
Paul in a single chapter, to tell in a few minutes 
the vast story of him. And I know perfectly 
well that it cannot be done — by me. Frankly, I 
do not think it could be done by anybody. Try 
to lift yourself by your boot-straps, or to paint 
the aurora borealis, or to love your enemies — 
or any other so-called impossible thing; but not 
to hack Paul down to the limits of a chapter. 
He is too big; too bulging with significance; too 
heroic in moral stature; too appallingly vital; 
too passionate in his zeal. You cannot bound 
him — any more than you can bound the stellar 
spaces. You cannot describe him — any more 
than you can describe Niagara, or the Alps, 
or the leaping love in the heart of a woman. 
After this chapter is read, you will make no 
severer comment than I make at the beginning: 
it cannot be done. 

Yet we must not omit him from our cata- 
logue of the giants of the Bible. Lacking his 
portrait, the gallery is incomplete. Well, then, 
let me merely attempt to do what cartoonists 
do with a few strokes of their crayons: let me 
suggest him. And the first stroke shall be 
taken from our first glimpse of him — at the 



PAUL 305 

death of Stephen. "The witnesses laid down 
their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name 
was Saul." It does not appear that a single 
one of the murderous stones which beat out 
Stephen's life flew from this young man's hand. 
I do not think he had any special animosity 
toward Stephen. So far as the Record says, 
he was merely a spectator who did not protest. 
But isn't that enough? By and by, when the 
story of this cruel war is written, will it not be 
sufficient charge against us that we let Belgium 
be violated, without an angry protest on our 
part? Most assuredly we did not want war. 
Yet we have been a party to it from the begin- 
ning. We ought to have said something; we 
ought to have done things earlier than we did. 
In such a titanic struggle as this there are no 
neutrals. There is no room for them. One 
way or another we ought to have broken sooner 
out of the ranks of the unconcerned. If Ger- 
many was right, we ought to have said so with 
a voice that could not be misunderstood. If 
she was wrong, we ought to have said that, 
unmistakably. What we did say was nothing, 
which is sometimes everything that needs to be 
said to classify the witness. And I have the feel- 
ing that, if now, at this late day, we must spill 



306 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

much blood under the flag, part of it will be 
needed to help redeem the name we lost while 
we were doing nothing except let events take 
their course. 

But I am thinking in more personal terms. I 
am thinking how often the deciding vote is cast 
by the man who, ostensibly, does not vote at 
all. In the event, it was the stay-at-home 
voter who defeated Hughes and elected Wilson. 
Not the pacifist vote, not the woman vote, 
not the Old Guard vote, but the vote that 
was not cast at all — in the ballot box. Not 
adverse opinion, but apathy, indolence, gen- 
eral grouchiness — these gave the result. The 
man who did not care what happened pro- 
duced a very definite result, the direct oppo- 
site, perhaps, of that he secretly wished. 
And such is the event continually. Maryland 
is still cursed with race-track gambling, not 
because a majority of her citizens approve the 
enterprise, but because they do not disbelieve 
in it definitely, and aloud. "Curse ye Meroz," 
cried the prophet, "curse ye bitterly." Why? 
Meroz had not "done" anything. Exactly. 
She had not "done" anything except paralyze 
the neighbor who needed her. She had not 
done anything except decline to be an ade- 



PAUL 307 

quate partner in the extremity of her neigh- 
bor's need. Safe in her mountain home, a 
natural ally of the other, she had merely looked 
on when God needed friends, as he constantly 
does. Remember that nothing of terrestrial 
betterment is impossible, if we can be smoked 
out of our unconcerned spectatorship and com- 
pelled to take sides. 

Yonder is a man maligned — your friend, per- 
haps. His enemies are saying bitter things 
against him. But his enemies cannot compass 
his ruin; cannot blast his reputation, even. 
That is reserved to us who say nothing at all. 
Slander is not an orchid: it cannot grow with- 
out plenty of soil. We who have nothing against 
the man; who, on the contrary, have a great 
many things for him, we furnish the soil for the 
black seed of malice to grow in. To jump to 
the rescue of any man's reputation — as you 
would to the rescue of a man drowning, and 
whether he be your friend or no — is the part of 
a chivalry surpassing that of the days when 
knighthood was in flower. 

And Jesus Christ — 'tis not traducers and 
deniers that defeat him. Jesus has never had 
much to fear from his enemies. Their most 
savage award has become the symbol of redemp- 



308 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

tion. He used the cross they nailed him to, 
as a magnet to lift the world. Call over the list 
of his open foes — Celsus, Julian, Bolingbroke, 
Bradlaugh, down to the latest defamer. "He 
that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." He 
can afford to laugh; but never at the man who 
plays neutral. I mean the man who sees no 
need to join a church. I mean the man who 
wishes Jesus well providing Jesus can win his 
battle alone. I mean the secret disciple who 
never breaks into eager avowal and runs up the 
flag of open allegiance. I mean you who decide 
the election — by not voting. I mean you at 
whose feet the witnesses lay their garments 
while they stone earth's best Man. 

This, then, is our first glimpse of Paul as the 
man who gave consent by saying nothing. I 
like the next glimpse better, in a way. It is 
that of a convinced and open foe. Here is the 
record: "As for Saul, he made havoc of the 
church, entering into every house, and haling 
men and women committed them to prison." 
At least he had the courage of his convictions, 
or his prejudices, or whatever you choose to call 
them. He no longer stood by, consenting; he 
came into the open as a foe, an immensely more 
hopeful attitude than that of neutrality. God 



PAUL 309 

can strike a spark on the flint of antagonism. 
He cannot evoke anything of hope from the 
putty of indifference. Saul was nearer his con- 
version, not only in point of time but in terms 
of soul, when he started for Damascus, "breath- 
ing out threatenings and slaughter," than when 
he stood by, silent, at Stephen's murder. 

I need not detail the story of his bitterness 
toward Jesus. But there is one point that 
needs to be stressed in passing — his consci- 
entiousness in persecuting. Hear him confess 
it in his own language: "I verily thought with 
myself, that I ought to do many things contrary 
to the name of Jesus of Nazareth; which things 
I did." In other words, his sincerity increased 
his efficiency as a persecutor. Pretty sad com- 
mentary on the theory that all one needs is a 
clear conscience. Some of the greatest crimes 
of the ages have been committed with a per- 
fectly clear conscience. Here are Frenchmen 
fighting Germany, and Italians fighting Aus- 
trians, and British fighting the Turks — and all, 
I suppose, with a clear conscience. And I have 
yet to hear of any U-boat commander being 
troubled of soul at the results of his work. 
Evidently, he sends his victims to their doom 
with as unharrowed mind as if he were hurry- 



310 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

ing them to their prayers. Well, then, if a 
clear conscience be all that one needs for 
justification of his deed, what are we raging 
about? 

Conscience requires educating, as truly as 
clumsy fingers do, or primitive brains. To say 
of yourself that you go by your own conscience 
is not much more conclusive than to affirm that 
you blow your own nose. The question re- 
mains as to what hind of conscience you go by. 
To have the approval of your conscience proves 
nothing as to the moral grade of your deed. 
There are men, I suppose, whose conscience 
remains undisturbed while they play the busi- 
ness game unfairly, or take a drink when they 
feel like it, or take advantage of women. Time 
and again I have heard a man profess, in the 
presence of his sin, that his conscience doesn't 
trouble him. As if that ended the contention. 
The vital matter is not whether or not his 
"conscience troubles him," but as to whether 
or not it ought to trouble him. There were 
many altered consciences when the Billy Sun- 
day campaign closed. Honesty is not enough; 
honesty must be illuminated. The difference 
between Saul the persecutor and Paul the apos- 
tle was not a difference in quantity of consci- 



PAUL Sll 

entiousness; it was a difference in quality of 
conscience. 

But this brings us to the next vivid glimpse 
of Saul. He was on the Damascus road, hot 
with cruel commission against the church. The 
last thing he was looking for was what actually 
happened. Here is the record: "As he jour- 
neyed, . . . suddenly there shined round about 
him a light from heaven." But what is the use 
of attempting to describe an experience like that? 
You might more hopefully try to tell me how 
strawberries taste, or what happened in your 
heart when love knocked at the door. Suffice 
to say that God got at Paul in new and unpre- 
cedented fashion. God whom Paul would have 
declared he was serving right manfully (just 
as you do when you declare yourselves as good 
as ordinary church members), God who breaks 
past our first and second lines of defense on his 
way to the city of Man-soul — God struck from 
the defiant soul of Paul a spark which has illu- 
minated the world. Something died by the side 
of the Damascus road that day; something was 
born, for the man who staggered to his feet 
and on into Damascus was an altered man. 

But what do you mean by that phrase, "an 
altered man"? I am not sure that you mean 



312 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

what I mean. One day the old square piano 
went out of our house for the last time, and a 
new instrument came in, different in shape, 
in scale, in tone. But that is not conversion; 
that is substitution. God's problem is im- 
mensely more difficult. His problem is to 
rescale and repitch, and in every possible way 
to renew, the old instrument. We let the old 
piano go because it had passed the age of repair. 
God never can do that. He never admits that 
a man is beyond hope of redemption. He is 
the infinite Conservator. He wastes nothing. 
He damps no native fire of the soul; he merely 
sets it burning on a better altar. He kills no 
personal gift, however shameful the record of 
its use; he dedicates it to a new Master. He 
makes a man no less the man — less virile, less 
ardent, less efficient. Rather God makes him 
more of a man by showing him how to use his 
whole self. The Paul who preached Jesus with 
an abandon which has been a challenge to all 
the ages since, was the Saul who persecuted 
Jesus with fire and fury — the same man; noth- 
ing lost, nothing forfeited, everything turned 
to its highest use. 

That is conversion. It is the digging of a new 
channel for an old stream. You will recall 



PAUL 313 

what the engineers did to the Chicago River. 
Unsightly, unsavory, sluggish stream — an of- 
fense to the eyes and a menace to the health 
of a city — they made it run in a new direction. 
That is conversion. The Christian man is a 
new man only in the sense that he has found 
a new direction, a fresh channel for his life. 
With Saul of Tarsus the whole issue turned on 
his attitude toward Jesus. It does so still. I 
am not asking what you would need to do if you 
desired to become a good Mohammedan or a 
faithful Buddhist. Ours is a Christian Church 
and there is only one question to ask: "What 
shall I do, then, with Jesus?" Paul looked up 
and cried, "What wilt thou have me do?" 
Dare you ask that question? 

"The acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it: 
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise." 

But my chapter on Paul is nearly long 
enough, and I have shown you nothing of Paul's 
ministry of his new Lord. Of his missionary 
journeys, of his incandescent zeal, of his almost 
incredible hardships, of his administrative gen- 
ius — of none of these is there time to speak. 
I bring you, instead, what may seem a strange 



314 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

glimpse of the man. I show him to you wearing 
a chain, a Roman prisoner's chain. Not voy- 
aging, not preaching, not writing pastoral let- 
ters, but wearing a chain — for Jesus Christ. 
And I show him to you thus because I believe 
that sometimes the supreme testimony of a 
disciple to Jesus Christ is the ability to wear 
a chain for him; I mean to accept curtailment 
of privilege and abridgment of normal human 
rights as a service of Jesus Christ. When I 
see Paul victorious in spite of the chain he wore, 
cheerful under it, singing above it, I realize the 
heroic Christian he was, for I can guess how 
much less heroism it required to work without 
complaint than to wear a chain and not whine. 

Your chain? O yes, you wear one, though 
not in public view. In fact, the most galling 
chain you wear is seen by God only, and you. 
It is the sign of your loyalty to duty. It 
registers the price you are willing to pay for 
your ideals. But thrice hateful chain! You 
would be less than human if your flesh did not 
bleed under it; if, in the long sessions of the 
night, you never cried out against it. Your 
chain. Not self -assumed as ascetic monks put 
theirs on. Life brought it to you, and love 
helps you bear it. But, God, the pain! Well, 



PAUL 315 

then, why not exalt it into a badge of Jesus 
Christ? Make it your supreme confession of 
him? Love can wear a chain. 

Just one further glimpse of this great servant 
of Jesus Christ (as he preferred to describe him- 
self). It is what I should expect — "no moan- 
ing of the bar" when he put out to sea. He 
says, "The time of my unmooring is at hand." 
Facing the open sea, with the salt wind on his 
cheek, and the face of the Captain in his soul, 
almost restless for the voyage to begin ! Front- 
ing the same uncharted sea, Byron groaned: 

"My days are in the yellow leaf, 

The fruits and flowers of life are gone: 
The worm, the canker, and the grief, 
Are mine alone." 

That is the wail of a man who has lost the Pilot. 
But hear Paul: "I am now ready to be offered, 
and the time of my unmooring is at hand. I 
have fought a good fight, I have finished my 
course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth — " 
but I leave God to finish the sentence. 



* XXIV 
THE PLEA FOR CERTAINTY— THOMAS 

In the guest-book of a little hotel in Switzer- 
land might once be read the full name of the 
poet Shelley, and this description, also penned 
by his own hand: "Poet, democrat, atheist." 
One can fancy the jaunty, defiant air with 
which the writing was done, particularly the 
last word of the three. Evidently, Shelley liked 
the sound of his own Philistinism, as some boys 
seem to enjoy the noise which disturbs a neigh- 
borhood. There are people who find pleasure in 
shocking others by a bravado of unbelief. To 
which species of unbelief there is not much to 
say, except to pity it. When a man reaches 
the arctic circle of atheism I do not want him 
to recommend the climate, any more than I 
wish to hear a cripple laud the loss of a leg or 
arm as an achievement. The unbeliever is a 
cripple; and I claim, at the least, the privilege 
of being sorry for him — he misses so much that 
makes life worth while. In no case let him tell 

316 



THOMAS 317 

me how much better off he is than I am who 
see my Father's face through the half-open 
door. Really he does not mean what he says; 
he is merely talking. 

I am to speak of a very different sort of man. 
"Doubting Thomas" they call him. But I 
do not think he would relish the name. He 
never would have signed himself "Thomas the 
Skeptic." Doubt was a pain to him, worse 
than headache. You never could have pre- 
vailed upon him to join a "Freethinkers' Club." 
He wanted to believe, went as far as he could in 
faith, and when his particular tether pulled him 
up short, you may read anguish in his eyes. 
Nowhere in his story can you find the faintest 
hint that Thomas was proud of his infirmity of 
soul. Darwin admitted once that he had lost 
all love for music and poetry, but he did not 
blow a horn in celebration of it. He stood at 
the door of those realms, wistful, sorry. As 
Clifford did when he found himself barred out 
of the paradise of his early faith: "I have 
watched the spring sun rise out of an empty 
heaven and shine upon a soulless earth, and I 
have felt with utter loneliness that the Com- 
panion is dead." "With utter loneliness" — 
that was the mood of Thomas when he asked to 



318 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

see the convincing nail-prints in the hands of 
his Lord. 

Shall we study him together? Then observe 
him, first, as a man who always had hard work 
to believe the things he most wanted to believe. 
There are people for whom any really good 
thing is "too good to be true." I do not mean 
that they prefer to believe the evil; but, con- 
stitutionally, they come with timid, hesitant 
feet to any great joy. Somehow the warm hues 
seem to have been left out of their spectrum. 
They see the azure more readily than the gold. 
God made them so, and I have no more right to 
scold them than to rage at a willow tree for 
its drooping leaves. Take two children, and 
present each with a gold piece. One grabs it 
from your hand, as if he had a native right to 
it. He never questions his ownership of it. 
Likely he wonders why you did not make it 
two gold pieces while you were playing bene- 
factor. Two, or a half dozen, would be no more 
than his due. And he carries it off without a 
misgiving. The other child is different. He 
can scarcely believe his own eyes when you lay 
the shining bit in his hand. He never expected 
such bounty. He holds it half shyly, or con- 
vulsively perhaps, as if at any moment it might 



THOMAS 319 

lift golden wings and leave him. Now and 
again he looks at it long and incredulously. 
Maybe he does not sleep very well that night, 
fearful of waking and finding his possession 
a dream. It is "too good to be true." That 
boy's name is Thomas. And if he lives to grow 
up, some day you will hear him pleading for 
a sight of the nail-prints in the palms of the 
Lord he loves. 

You will experience no difficulty in persuading 
John or Peter that he is a good man. He knew 
it all the time, long before you discovered it, 
and was waiting none too patiently for you to 
come to such recognition. "I don't need any- 
body to tell me that I am good looking," con- 
fessed to me a certain Beau Brummel. But 
Thomas never knew such a thing, whether con- 
cerning his face or his soul. Not even his mir- 
ror shows him whereof to set him proud. He 
finds it hard to believe the good that other 
people say about him. Compliments make 
him drop his eyes. His faults stand out with 
such painful distinctness before his glance 
that, sometimes, he can see nothing else to 
mention. He will not be sure that personal 
martyrdom is a praiseful thing. His name is 
Thomas. 



320 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Or try to show him his own gifts, and you 
will touch the same nerve. I mean that he will 
admit the same gift in another and deny it in 
himself. He has no more just appreciation of 
his powers than a child has of the value of the 
jewels it plays with. Said Ericsson, once, 
"God has given me, within certain limits, great- 
er powers than he has bestowed upon any 
other mortal." The admission does not sound 
modest. Thomas never can make it concern- 
ing himself. But it is a vast deal more comfort- 
able than the self-deprecating spirit which 
Thomas carries. And I think it is more com- 
plimentary to God. Sometimes I have envied, 
frankly, the man who knows that he can preach 
a great sermon, or write a worthy book, or do 
a big piece of work for the King. Thomas is 
never quite sure. 

Why, you cannot dower him with a love so 
rich as to kill his skepticism. The richer the 
love the more unworthy he feels of it. You 
must reassure him a thousand times that it is his 
for the asking, even without the asking. And 
even then he cannot quite believe it belongs 
to him. It seems so much "too good to be 
true." If I were a woman, I think I should 
prefer a different sort of lover. But there is 



THOMAS 321 

no accounting for tastes. And, besides, Thomas 
needs love more than Peter does, if that were 
possible. 

How then shall you expect Thomas to be 
other than himself when you front him with 
Jesus Christ? Apparently, Christianity is not 
good enough for some people. At least they 
are free to suggest how it might be better than 
it is. But with Thomas the case is different. 
Thomas can make out more comfortably with 
a less wonderful Lord. I mean that, in a deep 
sense, for Thomas, Jesus is "too good to be 
true." Thomas cannot quite trust himself to 
believe in the fulfillment of his own dream. It 
is too golden: 

"What think ye of Christ, then, when all's said and done? 
Like you this Christianity or not? 
It may be false, but do you wish it true? 
Has it your vote to be so if it can?" 

Ah, that is the gist of the matter. "Has it 
your vote?" Notice that it has Thomas's. 
Poor believer that he was, he was nevertheless 
ready to die for the faith he had. I like that. 
I like it immensely. Some of the greatest "be- 
lievers" I knew were hardly willing to back 
their faith with a ten-dollar bill. And it usually 
takes more than faith to move a mountain. 



322 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

Somebody may need to die in the process. 
Thomas was willing to give his life to the Man 
whose nail-prints he asked to see. Recall the 
circumstance. The prospect was dark for the 
new Kingdom. Threats were filling the air, 
like thunder clouds ready to spit their venom. 
And Jesus set his face toward the storm. And 
the man who challenged his mates to breast 
the storm with their Lord was not Peter the 
impulsive, nor John the beloved, but Thomas 
the doubter. Here is what he said: "Let us 
also go, that we may die with him." O, I like 
that! Others were willing to live with him — 
Peter and Philip and more. Still others were 
ready to reign with him — James and John, 
for example. But it was reserved for the 
doubter to offer, first, to die with him. "Let 
us also go, that we may die with him." 

Weigh the phrase. "Die with him" is the 
thing Thomas said. To die with your friend 
or your hope or your faith is an infinitely 
sadder thing than to die for it. When his sur- 
geon told Montcalm, at Quebec, that he had 
but a few minutes to live, he closed his eyes 
like a weary child, and murmured, "Then I 
shall not live to see Quebec surrender." With 
the shouts of the onrushing victors pounding 



THOMAS 323 

his ears, he preferred to die. He was unwilling 
to survive his cause. In other words, he would 
lay down his life with Quebec? — not only for it, 
but with it. This is what thousands upon 
thousands of Belgians did. Everybody knew 
— themselves must have realized — that they 
had no better chance of saving their country 
alive than of stopping the tide. No braver 
feat of arms has ever been recorded than his- 
tory will credit to the name of that devoted 
little kingdom. And was it faith in their coun- 
try that nerved head and hand for the blow? 
We are accustomed to talk as if such sacrifices 
were made by men for their faith. I am think- 
ing of the sacrifice men make with their faith, 
unwilling to survive their own faith or the object 
of it? 

There died in England recently a ship-cap- 
tain who saved himself when his ship went 
down. They say he died of shame to have out- 
lived his vessel. But why should a commander 
be expected to go down with his ship? What 
ethic is that which holds him to the bridge when 
the craft under him is doomed? Not faith in 
the ship, not hope for the ship, not even love 
toward it. I do not think we can easily define 
the spirit. But Thomas phrased it, "Let us 



324 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

also go, that we may die with him." For some 
reason the captain is expected to die with his 
ship. 

And here are mothers who would gladly die 
for their boys. To say that implies hope. But 
some mothers have buried their hopes for their 
boys. They cannot even believe in them any 
more. Truth to tell, they have ceased looking 
for redemption to come. Of course they would 
die for their boys. Any genuine mother would 
do that She would lay down her own life 
joyously if so she might win back to God the 
recreant life of her boy. But to die with him, 
to bury her dearest hopes and herself in the 
grave which receives him — this is different, 
and, in its way, more sublime. 

Such is the spirit of Thomas. With Jesus 
dead, for some reason Thomas did not want to 
live. And Thomas expected Jesus to die. He 
was prey to that dark mood which blots out the 
horizon. Thomas could not see anything but 
trouble ahead if Jesus persisted in going to 
Bethany. Yet I do not read, in the Record, 
one word of protest on Thomas's part; just a 
quiet readiness to surrender his own life to the 
storm which would beat out his Master's. 
"Let us also go, that we may die with him." 



THOMAS 325 

O Thomas, Thomas, we have called you the 
doubter, and scolded you for the fault; whereas 
we, with all our faith, would hardly be willing 
to die for that Lord with whom you were ready 
to die! 

But I have not yet named the deepest thing 
in Thomas. The deepest thing in Thomas 
was not his skepticism, nor his courage, but his 
love. Sometimes I fancy that Thomas was the 
most ardent lover in the little group about 
Jesus. Sometimes doubt is born of love. I 
do not entertain any particular doubts con- 
cerning the ordinary man on the street. He 
may be good or bad, loyal or disloyal. It does 
not greatly matter — to me — until he becomes 
my friend. Then everything about him mat- 
ters. I watch his eyes and his hand, and dis- 
criminate between the varying tones of his 
voice, in proportion as he is my friend. His 
frown clouds my sky because he is my friend. 
His apparent coldness chills me to the bone. 
because I love him. I know they say that "per- 
fect love casteth out fear." But that is not 
necessarily a perfect love which never goes cold 
with fear. Love must grow before it is big 
enough to bear the blue flower of fear. In a 
deep, divine sense love is the mother of fear. 



326 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

I fear for my friend, for his health, his happi- 
ness, his love of me, because he is my friend. 

"For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." 
What do you make of that? God jealous? I 
hear it said that only small souls are jealous. 
And the saying is true in a way. But that love 
which is not jealous of its own is a small love. 
I am not talking about suspicion, which is a 
very different article. Suspicion is one of the 
huskiest children of hell. It has more lives 
than a cat. You can hardly kill it with the 
truth. To "suspect" means to look from under 
one's brows, and when you look thus you can 
always see things red, always confirmation of 
the thing you fear. But even God is jealous. 
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." 
His love does not cast out fear; it makes him 
anxious lest we pour before unworthy altars 
the love which belongs to him. God under- 
stood Thomas, and Jesus was infinitely kind; 
Thomas loved so well — so well that he was 
ready to die for his love. Somebody says that 
all the other disciples loved our Lord for what 
he could do for them, but Thomas loved him for 
what he was. I do not know. No need to ex- 
alt Thomas at the expense of his fellows. But 
this appears: that Thomas was the first to offer 



THOMAS 327 

to lay down his life for his friend. And the 
Book says: "Greater love hath no man than 
this, that a man lay down his life for his friend." 
But what do I make of the particular doubt 
which has always been charged up against 
Thomas? "Except I shall see in his hands the 
print of the nails, . . . and thrust my hand 
into his side, I will not believe." What do 
I think of that? Well, I do not need to make 
of it anything worse than Jesus made of it. 
And Jesus treated it with inimitable gentleness. 
Thomas wanted to be sure. There are people 
who can bury a hope one day and dig it up 
twenty-four hours later, and so on through 
a series of sepultures and reanimations. I shall 
not call them shallow — merely opportunists. 
Like a dog I once knew, they are ready to own 
anyone as master. Thomas was different: 
deeper, more serious, half sad. He was not 
even an optimist: Just Thomas. And he 
laid away so much in the tomb with Jesus he 
could not bear to trifle with hope. 'Twas a 
real Lord that Thomas saw die. O the wounds 
in the hands and the side! (Thomas seems 
to have remembered them as did no other mem- 
ber of the group: they were gory and gaping 
in Thomas's soul.) And the risen Lord must 



328 SIDE-STEPPING SAINTS 

be not less real. Thomas must identify him 
by the print of the nails that killed him. 

I cannot find fault with that I may be sorry 
that Thomas's faith was not strong enough to 
bridge the chasm of that dreadful Friday. I 
could wish Thomas had been so sure of his Lord 
that he knew death could not hold him. But I 
cannot find fault with the demand for sight of 
the wounds. Do you suppose I would accept 
anybody's testimony as to the return of the 
mother I lost years ago? Would any voice in a 
cabinet, or writing on a slate suffice for my 
heart? Would it for you? I must put my 
hand in hers, and find .them warm as of yore. 
I must hear her speak my name. I must kiss 
her lips — not her garment, but her lips. I 
saw her in the casket. I must see her again, 
framed in the door as she waved me down the 
street, that winter morning — alive, alive. 

And Thomas? Thomas asked precisely what 
I should have asked, had I much at stake. He 
must put his fingers in the prints of the nails. 
And Jesus gave him the chance. No reproach, 
no coldness, just this: "Reach hither thy fin- 
ger, and behold my hands; and reach hither 
thy hand, and thrust it into my side." That 
is the length to which my Master will go with 



THOMAS 329 

a doubter. And then a strange thing happened. 
Thomas did not need to make the test he had 
proposed. So far as we know, he never touched 
with his finger the wounds in the palms. Some- 
thing broke in the soul of the doubter, and he 
cried, "My Lord and my God." 



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